We’re not referring to the eight legged spiders hanging around outside your house, but rather we mean the spiders that search engines uses to find and catalogue content on the World Wide Web. There are certain formulas used in order for the spiders to accurately rank the information they find on their journeys across the Internet. This isn’t something you need to have an in-depth knowledge of or even understand past the fact that they exist, search for content, find it, use it and it gets ranked.
Most people once they get the idea of spiders are happy to realize that if they use them the right way, they may change their website ranking. Spiders aren’t that complicated to understand, as they are merely intelligent robots that gather information. The information spiders are able to read is very specific.
If your website has some fancy doings going on, for instance Flash or frames, the bad news is that spiders have trouble understanding it. In fact, that type of coding can’t be read by spiders. So if you want to optimize your site, you need to know how spiders see your world.
How would I go about seeing what a spider sees? Don’t panic, it’s very easy with a search engine spider simulator. So say for instance you have some content that is being ignored, get around it by adding image descriptions using the “alt” tag.
Yes, you can use “alt” tags for links and Flash descriptions as well. Don’t place too many keywords or you over do the optimization or wind up being told you’re keyword stuffing. The spider simulation software also tells you if your links are going to the right place.
Be wary about link exchanges, as they have been known to hand out fake links using script spiders can’t read. If you don’t see a link being shown by the simulator, you will know that isn’t right.
Just a thought about having links as well, since one school of thought insists you need to have tons of links to be on the top of the heap. Don’t use too many links, as all it does is return either a forbidden error or a page not found error. This means the spider can’t access the page. The spider simulator only shows links that work, so if you don’t see a link, you know it’s broken.
