Websites are in the eye of the spider

There is an age old saying that says that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Well, that statement can be changed slightly to fit in with our modern society and the internet. The beauty or value of your website is in the eye of the spider; web spider that is.

Spiders come to your website and trawl through every aspect of it. They may not see images or video clips. However, they do see when you add keyword rich Meta tags to those, how you use your keywords and much more. It is important that the spiders find your website to be interesting and full of value in order for you to rank well with the search engines.

The not so secret life of a spider

Engine spiders live a very simple life. They trawl the internet for websites that have something new to offer them, say when you update your content, and refresh your images and so on. So take note that a stale website that has had nothing updated, added or refreshed in several months is not going to draw their attention.

However, when they come to a website, they are all engines go and they make fast work of your hard work. They look through your website, making notes, paying attention in excruciatingly fine detail and passing judgement. Now, a spider passing judgement may not seem like much to you, but it is everything to your website.

A search engine spider can be the catalyst that gets you blacklisted with the engines and cause all sorts of other havoc for you. The spiders are “spies” for the engines, they are their eyes and they have a huge amount of power. This is why it is so important to impress a search engine spider when it comes to visit your website. The only way to truly impress any engine spider is through search engine optimization.

What a spider cannot see

When it comes to your website, there are certain things that a web spider can and cannot see. Any sort of graphics and images are as good as invisible to a spider; they simply cannot see it. If you take pride in an attractive website that is laden with graphics and great images, this is all good and well, but you need the text to back it up.

Looking at graphic text, spiders cannot see it and making it keyword rich is no use. You need to weigh up how important that text is to your website and then make an informed decision about it. Another thing that an engine spider cannot see is Flash. It may well impress your visitors of the human persuasion, but it will do little to make the spider see you in a good light.

What they can see

Now we get to what the spiders actually can see. They may not see graphic text but they can see HTML text and they take note of it and the keywords you are using in it. They cannot see images or graphics but they can see tags. Make sure that all your images, videos and graphics have keyword rich Meta tags attached.

Related posts:

1. See your site the way a spider does
2. Those forgotten Alt tags
3. Blogs and websites
4. Common Mistakes made in Search Engine Optimization
5. SEO and Ecommerce websites

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 4:21 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.