Search Engine Optimization Bots – Creepy Crawlings: Robots, Spiders, and Crawlers Oh My!
Did you know th
at humans are not the only visitors to your website? There are these creepy little things that crawl around your website 24/7 and REPORT to the search engines. They report on everything they can read. But it is easy to deceive them, because they aren’t very clever – they can’t report on anything they can’t read! So if there is something you want to hide from them, just put it in an image; or put it in Flash; or use Java Script navigation or drop-down menus! There are a lot of ways to stop those little crawlers dead in their tracks!
Hey, it’s Halloween. Just having a bit o fun!
Actually, the point of this blog is to make sure the search engine optimization / SEO robots DON’T get stopped dead in their tracks. You want them to creep and crawl around and report on EVERY page of your website that you want the humans to find. This is the point of search engine optimization.
The bots crawl by following links – that is why the more links to your site and within your site the better your SEO – provided the links are keyword relevant links to and from keyword relevant sites. Make sense? Good. Because that’s what the bots are trying to do – make sense of your site via links, keywords, meta, and content. You can make it easier for them by providing them with professional-quality search engine optimization.
A few SEO “do and don’ts” to help the little bots along…
- Images – Don’t post an image and think you are done. Add keyword relevant alt tags; i.e. lables the bots can read so they know what the image is about. And include a keyword in the image file name, too.
- Navigation – If you use a drop-down, also include text links to those pages.
- Meta Tags – Use them!
- Videos – Provide SEO titles and descriptions.
- Links – Use text links with keywords in them to and from relevant sites.
- Frames – Do NOT use them.
- Java Script – Bots can’t read it so keep it limited.
- Content – Provide prolific amounts of SEO textual content.
That list outa keep you busy with your search engine optimization efforts for awhile.
Happy Halloween!
BTW – Here is the code for the image in this post. Notice the use of the keyword “seo spider” in the file name, title, and alt text…
<img title=”seo spider” src=”http://meta-bee.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/seo-spider.png” alt=”seo spider” width=”267″ height=”300″ />
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
hello.
My name is hamidreza.
I am a computer_engineer.please help to me that how search engine search the picture(with Image Processing)?
and please send to me that if i upload one picture for search engine,why can the search engine search search the same picture and view for me?
thanks.
Hamidreza – I’m not sure I fully understand your question, but I’ll try to answer anyway. The search engine crawlers recognize images, however, they cannot “see” what the image is so you have to “tell” them what it is with keywords in the file name, title, and alt text as in this image. If you right click on this post and view source, you will see the html code for this image where I use “seo spiders” for the file name, image title, and alt text. You can search for images on Google and Google will show you images that have the keywords you are searching for.
i wanted to know if you dont have any content written on most of your pages if keywording the images and links inside of the site would be enough to get a high rank on seaerch engines. And if I get a lot of linking to my site. I have a huge shopping site opening up but every page is nothing but virtual graphics and links to stores. No content at all except for the links in my mall directory to every different category of stores on my site. I want to keep the feel of my whole site virtual…like you’re really there, so adding text on top of the screenshots would ruin the look. But once my site gets out there I know 100′s to thousands of people will be linking to it because no ones ever seen anything like it. Will i be okay without that much text on the pages except for links to stores, keywords in images and links in the mall directory thats on every page? I’ll have a mouse roll over on store images that gives decriptiions of sales and keywords to what kind of store it is too. Was wondering if bots read those. Those description boxes that pop up when you roll your mouse over it… as long as I can find one with HTML code… do those get scanned by bots?
Here are some tips for your shopping site:
1) use keywords in the urls for each page
2) use keywords in the meta title for each page
3) use keywords in your meta description
4) use keywords in each image title, description and alt tag
5) if it won’t ruin the look of your page too much, you can add keywords relevant text at the bottom of the page. For example, if you have a page that sells mp3 players, your url, title, and description should all have the keyword phrase “mp3 players” or some long-tailed keyword for the same PLUS you can add header tags by adding the appropriate html to your page around your keywords where you think it will look okay PLUS a text listing of all the KINDS of MP3 players you are selling; i.e. “Transcend MP850.” You can do keyword research to see which search terms people are using to search for the products you are selling and then be sure to include those search terms (keyword phrases) in all of the things I just mentioned. Does that make sense?
6) be sure you aren’t using any flash or poor navigation schemes that would block search engine bots from accessing and indexing your site because YES, they WILL if they can and are not blocked. They do scan all the items I’ve mentioned in addition to regular text. They also following your outgoing links and your internal links so be sure each page on your site links to and from other pages on your site.
7) once each webpage is optimized, you’ll want to start doing search engine MARKETING – which is getting your site listed in all appropriate directories and search engines and building links to it from various relevant and quality sources.
Example, I put h1 tags around Top Selling MP3 Players…
Top Selling MP3 Players
Transcend MP850
Apple iPod
Microsoft Zune
Sony Walkman
I’ve been doing 1-4 and planned on doing 5 once I decided where at the bottom I’d probably put the menu to all of the store categories on each page. thanx helps a lot