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Promotion Tip:
Through A Spider's Eyes
by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Much of Web site promotion involves optimizing your Web site to appeal to search engine spiders. The process is often complicated and frustrating. Before you can build a site that appeals to spiders, you need to understand how a spider sees your site.
Just The Text, Please
A search engine spider looks at your site much like a text browser does. It likes text, lots of text, and ignores information contained in graphic images. Spiders do enjoy reading about the images if you're thoughtful enough to supply ALT text descriptions. However, that's the only interaction a search engine spider will have with your image files.
This is a source of great frustration to Web designers who painstakingly design elaborate splash pages with many beautiful graphic images, but very little content. Even sites without splash pages may have trouble achieving a high search rank if they rely heavily on graphic images to convey important information.
You don't have to dump all your graphics; just be careful how you use them.
- Any important information that's displayed in a graphic file should also be included in a text format.
- Avoid submitting splash pages to search engines. Submit the URL of your main content page to search engines, not your splash page.
- Use ALT descriptions for all your images and include keywords in the descriptive text where it's appropriate.
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That helps a spider catalog your site and also makes it more accessible to visitors using assistive technologies like screen readers.
What Spiders Want To See
A spider cruises through your Web pages looking for a variety of components. Once it locates and catalogs everything, the spider scores each page for relevancy using the search engine's proprietary algorithm.
Search engines guard their algorithm formulas and change them frequently to combat spammers. It's difficult to design a page that will rank well in all engines, but you increase your odds by including all these elements:
Some search engines still score individual pages separately, but many are moving towards a more themes-based format that scores the entire Web site based on the overall theme.
Show It To Them Quickly
Spiders are busy little creatures that have a lot of sites to visit in a short period of time. Depending on the particular search engine algorithm, the spider may not actually read all the text on your page. Some stop after a certain number of lines or even characters.
Why? Well, think about the front page of your favorite newspaper. What stories are placed near the top, above the fold? The most important news goes first, with headlines in big print to attract readers' attention.
Many spiders assume that your Web page works like a newspaper page and give more weight to information found early on the page. Your visitors make the same assumption. People prefer to scan a page quickly instead of scrolling through endless screens of text looking for information.
You'll do better with both spiders and humans if you structure your page logically and make your important points quickly and clearly.
Read Like A Spider
You can evaluate your page structure and flow several ways. Looking at it in a browser is the easiest method, but also the least successful. It's hard to evaluate your own page objectively.
Another option is to look at how your page displays in a text browser. The Delorie.com Web site offers a free online Lynx simulator that shows you how your page will display in one version of Lynx. You can immediately tell if the spider has to wade through a lot of navigation information, ad links, and other information before it ever gets to the real page content.
Look that the simulation, then consider reading it aloud. That gives you an idea of how your Web page might sound to someone using a screen reader. It's one quick way to check the overall accessibility of your page.
For more detailed information, use a search engine simulator like the one available - again for free! - at the Delorie site. Delorie's simulator displays an online report with three different sections:
- Summary based on all text on page
- Summary based on headers only
- Text excerpt of page
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Simply knowing how your page might look to a spider is only part of the Web site promotion process. You also need to understand each search engine's ranking criteria so you can optimize your pages accordingly. But since search engines change their algorithms constantly, it's almost impossible for a single individual to keep up.
That's why simply checking your page with these free tools isn't enough. They give you a basic idea about how a generic search engine spider works. You need to know more to optimize your site for a specific spider.
NetMechanic's Page Primer picks up where spider simulation tools stop. It will give you tips to optimize each page of your site for specific search engine spiders. Wouldn't you like to know:
- How deep into your page content the spider will read. You may have your important content placed too far down on the page.
- If your keywords are too light - or too dense - for the spider to score the page properly. Too many keywords can get you banned as a spammer.
- Whether your keywords are prominent enough for the spider to weight them in the scoring algorithm. Spiders look at your HTML code to see how important you think the keywords are.
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Page Primer is just one component of Search Engine Power Pack, an online tool that's constantly updated to track change in search engine ranking methods. Use it to analyze your page and receive personalized recommendations to improve the ranking of your Web pages.
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