We, as webmasters or website owners, are always looking for ways to supplement
search engine spiders. I call it 'supplementing spiders'.What we are trying to do is encourage these 'spiders' to come feed on keywords and 'content' of our websites, in hopes of getting a higher positioning in search page ranking. It is like trying to put your head above crowd and be noticed.
The experiment began with a new site that has been online a little more than a month [from time of this writing]. What was decided was to create best atmosphere for attracting Googlebot. A plan would be needed to attract Google and save time, effort and outlay of cash for a Yahoo! listing. Google was also needed to build a page rank. Starting from zero we had to have a game plan.
The conclusion was reached that time spent now would pay off ten-fold down road. The new site is a free cross content article directory for websites, ezines and a learning portal. Keyword search was preformed on every search term imaginable. Every site that could be found that remotely related to articles and article directories was reviewed. Some of these sites were exclusive to articles while some only had a directory of articles on site in a subdirectory. What they had in common was that all had a front page or top 10 ranking in Google and/or Yahoo! for 'articles'. Note: there were also 417,000,000 other sites listed for "articles" that were indexed that have never seen fringes of front page much less top 100. With that goal set, our task lay before us. The plan follows: 1.] A decision made on look and feel of site. This is important not for spiders [Google & Yahoo!] but for site’s future visitors. Reason? What good is it to have a site that no one will come back to because it is unpleasant or because of visual or navigation problems. The robots.txt file was set up so that it would invite spiders to crawl among selected pages and directories of site.
2.] The index page was designed making sure it had an accessible navigation plan based on suggestions of www.lighthouse.org and www.accessify.com/default.asp. These improvements continue to be added throughout site. Every link led to content using keywords in links and text anchors where possible. Optimized site using a selection of keywords that were relevant to site’s theme using Good Keywords and Overture. We were fortunate as we were building an article and content directory and we all know articles make excellent spider supplements. Like vitamins for body...
3.] A Site Map was created and linked from front page that provided visitor and spiders with a road map of site. Using www.netroglycerine.com/sitemap.html, as we did you can easily generate a full sitemap for your website. Enter your URL in space provided, hit enter on your keyboard and wait for links to be displayed. Save page from File menu and edit links to suit your requirements.
4.] Next we brought together a collection of articles and content that would provide a rich array of information for both spider and visitor. This was accomplished by adding articles personally written and some hand selected content to fit site’s topics and categories. These included a wide variety of subjects like short stories, tutorials on uses of herbs to R.S.S and how to use email.
