Want Website Visibility? Get Prepared For Spiders

No, not the creepy crawlers that invade your house. There’s nothing creepy about the spiders we’re talking about – these crawlers (that’s the other name for them) move through the Internet at nearly the speed of light. Dispatched by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live these spiders zip over every attribute of your website to see how it measures up. They judge your site by algorithms that will determine if a search will return your site listed on results page one, page seven, or page sixty-two.

Because search engine algorithms are kept secret and are frequently changed, preparing a site for high ranking and keeping it there is a demanding task, one that is never finished. There is no right and final answer, but there are much discussed guidelines that follow search engine best practices and can virtually guarantee you a slot on page 1. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the generic term for the process of tuning a website so that it achieves the best possible search results – as close as possible to a page one listing.

Your website must be designed for effective communication with a human being, and part of that design must be satisfying the search engines that bring it to the visitor. A site must have strong elements that visitors can connect and engage with as well as copious copy, well labeled images, lots of links and keyword rich title tags for search engines. This is not a slam dunk task.

The web crawler has not dropped in to try an entrée or two. It‘s there as a sort of Digital Health Department with for a critical eye and a long checklist: – are there incoming links from other websites? – what is the quantity and quality of content? – Is the content grammatically correct with no misspellings? – is the site unique or redundant? – how many internal links and how many are broken? – how many unique visitors, page views, revisits, conversions? – is the source code technically precise? It may seem like an intimidating checklist, but a fundamentally sound website will have a good chance at ranking well in the search engines.

Search engine spiders like an interesting buffet of copy, keywords, text and links. You want to have 200-500 words of copy per page, well labeled images, copious navigation links and a keyword rich title tag. Common problems are sites that are heavy in graphics, interactive media/flash/video and audio. An easy test to see if your website passes the indexing test is to use the view source button on your browser or use this automated tool to see a search engine spider simulation.

We may not be afraid of spiders, but if we want good search results, we must prepare for them.
The spiders are coming. But don’t call an exterminator, update the text & links on your website and prepare for more business.