We’ve all heard of search engine optimisation (SEO), but are you aware of search bots and spiders and the role that they play in your internet marketing? Search bots and spiders are the tools used by search engines to read and index websites. Also sometimes known as ‘crawlers’ or ‘robots’, this automated software tool provides information to the search engines from which they will decide upon the relevance of your website when a user types in a search term or query into a search engine.
The search bots and spiders are not incredibly sophisticated – they simply take their cues from the way that your website has been laid out. This means that you need to help them by giving them the right information in the right structure to help them to ‘read’ your website and use the data gathered to index your site on the search engine database. This is one of the reasons that search engine optimisation is so critical to your internet marketing strategy.
Feeding Search Bots and Spiders With Good SEO
Search bots and spiders are simply retrieval tools, scanning your website for data that helps the search engines to decide when your website might be relevant to a search. To help them to perform this job properly and lead visitors to your site, you need to ‘feed’ them with good search engine optimisation. The search bots read all of the visible content on your site and also indexes from the source code of your website, so you need to make sure that you have implemented sound SEO across your site. They will pay particular attention to title tags, meta tags and descriptions, link anchor text, H1/H2/H3 tags and the overall content. The search bots and spiders will also look for links to your site from other websites, so link building should also be another consideration in your overall SEO and internet marketing strategy.
Search bots and spiders do not have an understanding of frames, Flash, images or JavaScript – so think carefully about the value these items are adding to your website when you consider your internet marketing and SEO strategy. Where you do use images on your website, make sure that you use a text description so that the search bots have something to identify and log. Once you have a website up and running that has been indexed in a search engine’s database, that engine’s search bots and spiders will continue to visit your site. The more regularly you update your website content and the more traffic you receive, the more incentive the search bots and spiders have to revisit your site; therefore, regular site updates should also feature as an integral part of your SEO and internet marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing
Developing and implementing an effective internet marketing strategy is a very complex procedure; understanding all the various aspects of SEO can take time and when you’re busy managing the day to day responsibilities of running a business, finding that time can be difficult.
Solutions Four offer professional search engine optimisation services to help the search bots and spiders find your site and create better search returns for your chosen keywords. If you would like to find out more about our internet marketing campaigns and SEO, please contact us now.
