The Itsy Bitsy Spiders

Remember the phrase “Build it, and they will come…” ? Well, that may be true for baseball fields in the movies, but it’s certainly not the case for web sites! In order to bring traffic to your web site, you are going to need the help of the web’s most used resource – Search Engines – and their “itsy bitsy spiders.”

There are many search engines on the web, and they all use different methods of gathering and indexing web site information. The most important search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask, account for about 75% of all internet searches, while a handful of smaller search engines are responsible for the remaining 25%. The biggest obstacle to getting your site into a #1 position, though, is the sheer number of competing web sites out there. Think about it, of all the millions of web sites on the internet, how can you make your site come up first in the list? Or in some cases, the question may be how can you make your site show up at all?

Well, it’s not an exact science, but by understanding more about how search engines work, and understanding the importance of search engine spiders, you can improve your chances of getting noticed by the search engines.

Be Nice to Spiders
Search engines send out “spiders” (also called “bots”) that look for new information on the web, and they collect as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. Since they are in such a hurry, your web site needs to be friendly and inviting, providing the spider with exactly what it is looking for, which is web site text (content), lots of links, and clean HTML code.

The search engine then takes all of the information the spider gathered and analyzes it to determine how “important” your web site is (in their opinion, of course). Then, when a visitor types in a search term, the search engine displays results in order of importance, based on the information gathered by the spider. Depending on how important the search engine thinks your site is, your web site may or may not be displayed in the search results.

Food for Thought - and Spiders
So you can see how important it is that your web site be spider-friendly in order to have any chance of showing up in the search engine results. To be successful, you must feed the spiders what they want the most – good content, abundant links, and clean code. The words people use when they search – often called keywords – ultimately determine which web sites are displayed when a search engine finds sites that match those keywords, and all of it is based on what those little spiders said about your web site!

So be very careful with what you “feed” the spiders, it could mean the difference between good search engine positions, and not showing up in the search results at all.