Loading ...You can spend your life making efforts to optimise a site, but what counts is how a search engines sees your efforts. Even the most carefully optimised site will not get you top positions if you don’t follow basic SEO tactics and more than that it is a sure way to making sure that you don’t score with a search engine.
Spiders
All search engine spiders follow the same principle and that is that they constantly crawl the web and index web pages that are stored in a database. They then use various algorithms in order to determine the ranking and relevance of these pages.
Even though algorithms and methods of calculating rankings varies from search engine to search engine, the method for indexing is quite uniform, so it is vital that you know what interests spiders and what doesn’t.
As spiders are a form of robot, they don’t read web pages the way humans do, they only see certain things while turning a blind eye to things that are intended for humans, such as JavaScipt and Flash. Their role is to determine what we will find on a site, so it is important to give consideration to what they like and what they don’t.
Human elements not visible to spiders
Flash, JavaScript, Image Text and Frames. Frames are a real disaster to Search Engine Optimization ranking and while they are a great aid to design, they are wrong just as Flash intro pages are. Flash Intro Pages with keywords buried in the animation will result in a search engine seeing these pages as blank.
Spiders are text browsers and they don’t see anything that not text, having images with text in it is useless. If you want to practice SEO, rather include a meaningful description of the image in the ALT attribute instead, but don’t use too many keywords as you may run the risk of incurring penalties if a search engines things you are guilty of keyword stuffing. ALT attributes are helpful if not essential when you use links rather than text links as this will enable you to describe what a Flash movie is about.
Other things
If you want to make sure that your hyperlinks are leading to the right place, a search engine spider simulator is a great help. Sometime link exchange websites put fake links onto your site in order to make them look genuine. This results in the search engine not being able to see or follow it, you need to recognise these and weed them out. Javascript based menus are not ‘spiderable’ and they will ignore them. Rather use <noscript> tags instead. If your pages display ‘403 forbidden’ or ‘404 page not found’, spiders cannot access your page and you will not be indexed, so it is vital that you keep on top of checking your links.
Keywords weigh more if they are placed in the first paragraph of a page, but even though we may see keywords on the top of page, a spider may not. It is helpful to be able to see with the eyes of a spider where keywords are located among the text. There are specific tools you can use to help with this.
Related posts:
- Websites are in the eye of the spider
- Five things to make your site more attractive to both humans and spiders
- Attract search engine spiders
- Adding your site to Google
- Site analysis is vital to SEO
Tags: SEO, SEO Advice, SEO Spiders
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