Search engine spiders

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All search engines have robotic spiders to crawl the websites and collect relevant data for the search engine results. Technically we call it spider index of the website.

These spiders are quite different form human visitors. So if you wants good position in search engine results you have to build your site spider friendly way. You have to organize your web site structure as well as page content to ensure that spiders index the whole site, not just part of it.

All the text in the header area is more important than other text in the page. Remember that links and header tags that contain keywords matching the META tag keywords are more important than those that do not match with the META tag.

Arranging important content and important massages earlier, helps spider to catch them easily. Chance is always low when content go down in the pages and down in the levels in the web site. Try to design your site with as few levels as possible.

There are very fancy design techniques that attract visitors, but unfortunately some fancy design techniques leave spiders make blind.

Complex JavaScript code inserted in the HEAD tag takes up a huge amount of space. Try to use an external JavaScript file to reduce page size or place your JavaScript code at the bottom of the page whenever possible. Many editors let you include basic JavaScript effects like drop-down menus and rollovers automatically. These editor-generated JavaScript are easy to build but they create big code. A simple rollover event that takes a few lines to hand code might be 10 times that size the editor-generated one.

It is very common today that a splash pages add at first level in websites. Remember this external level splash page push all of your other content down one level. This increases the chance that both humans and spiders will miss it. Visitors have to wait for 3 or more pages to load and have to click 3 or more times before finding the information they want, while search engine spiders search through multiple pages before finding good content to index.

Use style sheets to reduce bloated code and decrease download time. Style sheets eliminate extraneous HTML code, so the spider can get straight to your content. Try to keep your table structure as simple as possible. Some spiders tend to get lost in a web of nested tables where the content is buried deep inside a complex table structure. Even for human visitor that is not good exercise.

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