How to Keep Search Engine Spiders Interested In Your Website!

By Chris M Hunter

In the ongoing battle for good search engine rankings, it is important to develop good SEO and marketing strategies to keep traffic coming in as well as to attract the interest of web crawlers. Understanding the behavior of these creepy, crawling indexers is helpful in order to learn how to get listed faster and retain that interest long term.

Function

When a website is created, changed, or updated, all content pages need to be classified in order to be available to anyone searching for that page or its content. Indexing happens when the spiders find new or updated content, follow any imbedded links, and then register that presence in a search engine. It is the job of these spiders to keep search results populated with active, relevant information; listing in search results gives a website more traffic and a higher page rank. Without web crawlers, such information would be nearly impossible to find, so knowing how to attract the crawlers or robots is important.

Indexing

Indexing does actually happen on its own and all internet pages are eventually reached; however, it is a slow process that certainly takes longer than what is desired for both searcher and provider. High ranking websites are cataloged daily; others not so often. So it is important to strive to do what is listed below to keep crawlers visiting as frequently as possible and avoid anything that would block their ability to read pages.

• Incoming Links - With more incoming links, websites get indexed faster. Since incoming connectors indicate to a certain extent a particular indexing value and therefore demands attention. Maintaining site quality and encouraging natural back links is the best way to attract internet crawlers.


• Frequent Updates - Regularly updated pages stand the best chance to gain more spider attention, especially if already climbing in page rank. Regular updating allows internet crawlers and optimization to work together, each one being valuable on its own but less beneficial without the presence of the other. The main importance in either case is providing helpful, relevant, and frequent information.


• Page Links - One of the most significant features that is critical to easy and rapid indexing of web pages are connections that must be correctly maintained. From using the right URLs to promote listing ease to avoiding orphaned pages - providing a clear path of connectivity for spiders is essential. Web crawlers follow HTML links in order to find all website pages, so being sure all links work and connect to another page is vital. Pages that are not reachable by HTML links will simply not get indexed.

Accommodation

Indexing spiders like a simple, clean path to most efficiently catalog an entire website. Anything that makes this effort more difficult - such as video, java script, flash and images - makes listing slower or unattainable. So it is essential that all important information on each page is actual text, not a graphic, video or other difficult-to-read media. In cases where such elements are used, accommodating for search engines by using properly labeled alt-text can provide indexable words related to the non-readable parts of the page.

With so much internet competition and so many websites to be examined, it is important to understand the value of web spiders and how to keep them interested. Leaving indexing to chance or not putting in the effort to feed these crawlers works against optimization and all the other efforts spent trying to gain good page rank. With this in mind, it is vital to make the above points part of any regular internet development plan from the start so that the final result provides for efficient indexing by all of the hungry, internet crawling spiders!

Chris Hunter is an expert in Web Design and Search Engine Marketing. To find out more about SEO in Houston, go to the main website at:http://www.webunlimited.com.

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