In the past I have talked about setting up your Meta Tags
and submitting your site to the major search engines. Once
this has been done successfully you can expect to start
receiving visits from some of the search engine spiders.
What is a spider? Search engine spiders are small programs
that are sent out by the search engines to scurry around the
web looking at and cataloging web sits. They go by such
cryptic names as Mozilla, Slurp, Gulliver, ArchitextSpider
and so on. You can expect these spiders to visit monthly,
weekly and daily and if you are using a good Stats program
you will see them listed.
Something to note is that not all search Engines use their
own Spider. Slurp which is owned by Inktomi, is used by
several different search engines.
It has been reported that some search engines will give a
web page that has been "spidered" or "crawled." a higher
ranking than one that has been submitted. Unfortunately not
all spiders are created equal. Setting up your web site to
work well with one spider may not be appropriate for
another. In some instances different search engines will
interpret the same information gathered by a shared spider
differently, making the process of optimizing your web site
for this purpose even more difficult.
Even so, there are some things you can do to optimize your
site. Here are a few tips to ensure that you get the most
from these arachnid visitors.
1. Submit your two most important pages to the major search
engines on a timely basis, usually every two weeks. Many
spiders will not visit until your site has been submitted.
2. Ensure that all your pages are within three clicks of
your home page since many spiders will not index any further
than that.
3. Update your pages often. It gives the spiders a reason to
continue indexing your site.
4. Be certain all your pages have Meta Tags and that they
are properly set up. See our previous articles at: for
additional information on setting up your Meta Tags.
5. Avoid spam-dexing. This includes excessive repetition of
keywords, hidden text, tiny text etc.
Once your site has been catalogued, it can still take up to
several weeks before the search engines list it.
To find out more about the search engine spiders, take a
look at: searchengineworld
"IMS Web Tips" is a weekly news letter for all web site managers regardless of experience who are looking for detailed information on creating, maintaining and promoting their web sites.
If you like the contents of this newsletter, please recommend it to a friend. Not only will you help us to continue to provide you with useful and informative articles, you could also win $10,000. Click here for details.
