Imagine guiding a person who has been blind their entire life. What would you have to tell them while you guide them? Breathtaking sights would be difficult to describe. Places you like to visit might not be as amazing to someone who experiences the environment in ways not completely understood by you. Welcome to the life a search engine spider.
Do not let your arachnophobia set in just yet, these are not real spiders, in fact you couldn’t even hold one if you wanted to. Search engine spiders are actually robots or a program that analyzes websites by reading through all the data presented by a website. Some people compared this process to crawling which is how the search engine robots earned the name search engine spiders.
You want your website to literally be infested with search engine spiders as often as possible. Unlike the creepy spiders you may have seen scampering across the floor last night, you should avoid doing anything to drive these useful spiders away. Imagine again the blind person we mentioned earlier if you started speaking a language they didn’t understand would they stay with you or leave to go find someone that could explain things in their own language. This same concept applies to search engine spiders and your community or website. Except in this case if the spider has difficulty reading or “traveling” through your site, it will not go find another guide it will simply leave your site all together.
What do they see?
Search engine spiders cannot see pictures, designs, watch videos, or even hear. The only thing they can do extremely well is read. No matter how breathtaking your site is the spiders will not realize it unless you tell them. For example, if you have a picture of the most beautiful tree in the whole world on your website, do you think someone will land on your site by typing “the most beautiful tree in the whole world” in Google? Probably not, because the search engine spider cannot see the picture of the tree. You could tell the search engine spider that the picture was a picture of a dog and it would most likely believe you until you told it otherwise. Unless you explain it, the spider won’t get it!
What can you do? Since the spider can only understand text, the best thing you can do is explain everything about your website using exactly what they look for…text! This will assist the spiders in not only learning what your site is about but also give others the opportunity to find your site when properly indexed by the search engines after they have been crawled.
Spiders get bored….really fast!
Even if your website is the “hip” place to be, the search engine spiders can become bored fairly quickly if they continue to “crawl” your site and never find anything new they will not stop by as frequently and eventually will go looking for a new” party”. By updating your content regularly you keep the spiders interested and they will start to pass through more frequently allowing your content to be indexed in the search engines sooner, which in turns makes it easier for people to find your website.
This is only part of what is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO, but it is one of the easiest parts to understand and implement in ecommerce. Simply put the more pages you have indexed the more chances you have to be found. So remember to describe it, keep your site frequently updated, keep it simple, and let the infestation begin!
