Smitty’s Web Marketing Blog

When a web site is submitted to a search engine, a piece of scanning software called a spider, is used to read all the web pages of a website. The spider uses the menu hyperlinks, the links to other pages, to find each web page. This scan will index all the text and readable information you present to the internet world. Once it is completed, the information collected is added to an enormous database of that search engine. So when someone enters that search engine and types a particular query, they will be able to locate web sites offering that information.

Each Search Engine has it’s own “spider”. The spider is made up of code that works differently for each search engine, but many of the search engine spiders have similar rules when scanning a web site.

The main rule is the web page code, called html, should be error free. (Yes, I read that recent article about Google and poorly coded web sites rankings, but I still think the code needs to be clean. I bet they will fix that in another update) So nothing can impede the spider software. One of the problems I seem to run into are the menu systems. Some website menu designs do not allow search engine spiders to follow the menu system, so the search engine will not index your website. It will only index the first page with whatever content is on it.

There are several ways to correct this.
- You can change the menu system to a text based, CSS type of menu system
- You can add a text menu to the bottom of the web page as a second menu system
- You can update the code to the latest version that has been tested to be search engine friendly

There are other techniques to help optimize the web page.

- for images - No Search Engine will understand the content of an image except for it’s text name. So to get the search engines to understand what the image represents use “alt tags” which are the text equivalent of the image. This will also help those with vision impairments understand your web page.

- To work around some of the code issues - we can create a sitemap off the main page that will let the spiders search all the web pages for information.

- There are also some no-no’s like any text on the web page that is the same or close to same color as the background. The text looks hidden or almost hidden. The search engine will penalize you for those types of techniques.

- Another recent non-no is using hidden text in the CSS files. There are plenty of thing that can now effect your web page ranking. The best thing to do is stick with the traditional techniques - Titles, Descriptions, Metatags (although meta tags are not that useful - I still recommend them) and of course loads of good content!

There are many techniques used to “help” the spiders locate the correct information. You can contact us to help you with your website marketing.

-= Smitty =-

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Titles and Descriptions are one of the first things the search engine spiders read when they get to your web page. There are several thoughts you need to keep in mind concerning them.

1) Be sure that each web page has a unique title. First be sure that there is a title in place. I have seen so many web pages saying ” Untitled”. No two web pages on your web site should have the same title information. Include the keyword phrase if you can and the location if you are looking for local web traffic.

2) The Description tag needs to be informative and not more than two - to three sentences. The first sentence needs to be the clencher - provide the reader with a quick synopsys and be sure to reuse that keyword phrase with the location.

I see so many web sites that lack these elements - it would make it easier for everyone to locate information with properly configured titles and descriptions.

Have a great day….

-= Smitty =-

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The log files hold a good deal of secrets. Like who your visitors are, what they look at, which pages were viewed, keywords used to find you, search engine spiders, browser types, ip addresses, and other activity.

The key is to check the log files on a regualr basis. You can find and ban IP addresses from people trying to link to images, probing for directories, and others trying to hack your site.

There are several webstat programs out there, but your web hosting company should have one in place that you can use to view your information. It is an interesting and illuminating piece of information that can help in marketing and protecting your web site.

-Smitty

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