Understanding Search Engine Robots

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There is one very important lesson to be learned from this crazy robot behavior. You need to make navigation in your web site so easy that a visitor can find any page within 2 clicks of your home page. One way of doing this is installing hidden DotLinks [Dotlinks are little periods that are linked to other pages which are not really noticeable on your page if you put it as a period. Although, they are not easily seen by human eye, they are a link that a robot can follow] in your web site. When you do this, robots can find your pages faster and more easily. Giving The Robots What They Want. So how do you make search engine robots give your site a better rating than all other millions of websites trying to do same thing? Simple, give them what they want. You can't trick them or make them think that you are better than you are. Think about a visit from eyes of a robot. He finds a site, usually from links embedded in web pages, then loads text from first page. He looks for META tags and pulls out keywords and description. If not there he takes first 200 or so characters of text and uses them as a description. The Title is extracted. He extracts pure text from page (strips out HTML coding). He takes out common words leaving what he feels may be keywords. (Most do not do this last step.) He now extracts hyperlinks collating them into those that belong to this website and those that don't (He visits these later as this is how he finds new websites). He may do same with email addresses. He goes on to next page and so on until he has visited all of pages in your web site. Now they store all of this information. He now knows how many pages you have, how many 'outside hyperlinks in your site', and can give your site a score based on how it is set up. These are basics. What do they do with info? When someone comes to search a phrase or keyword, another search routine program takes over using information robot found. A person types in keywords and search program returns 256,000 pages matching their keywords. BUT they also consider following: How old is website or how long has engine known about it? How large is website? Was it properly constructed? How many hyperlinks are there to outside websites? VERY IMPORTANT! How many hyperlinks are located on other websites to this site. The older and better website more links to it. These robots know when you are cheating. You can't trick them. It is so simple for robot developer to incorporate code to negate tricks. What about scoring keywords only once or twice per page or area like meta, title, etc? Is this page close in size to all other portal pages? How many web pages in same directory have word "index" in them? Does this site have a lot of content? Are there links to outside sites? Each page can be checked and compared against what robot feels is a statistically normal page. These are computers you know. You need a lot of pages with normal content. Instead of spending time to make fake pages, give real ones content. This will also give your visitors something to come back to. CONTENT I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

David Bell is Manager, Online Marketing, at http://www.wspromotion.com/ , a leading Search Engine Optimization services firm and Advertising Agency.

The Art of Website Optimization

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Every webmaster should analyze their site's keyword count. Your most important keywords should be 5% - 8% of your keyword count. If your percentages are too high, search engines may consider your site as "spam". If your percentages are too low, your site will never appear in Top 100 of any search. Keyword and relevancy optimization can easily move a site from complete obscurity to instant popularity in search engines overnight. Do it right first time and I'll see you at top! It's a painstaking process but website optimization is a necessary step towards securing market position. In an age of instant gratification, ones and zeros, gigabytes and terabytes, simple virtues of patience and perseverance are seldom nurtured. In developing your website, take time to reflect on your mission, and if you do only one thing well, share your passion with your target audience. Do it for sheer love of it. Your audience will appreciate your efforts. It's first step towards creating a website that speaks language that your visitors want to hear! With right attention to detail, just like a long lasting relationship, you'll have no fear in night that your website might desert you. I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

David Bell is Manager, Online Marketing, at http://www.wspromotion.com/ , a leading Search Engine Optimization services firm and Advertising Agency.