SEO Feeding the spider
Feeding the Spiders
In SEO terms, a spider (also called a bot) is a little piece of software that the search engines run to crawl (hence the name spider) the websites on the internet. It does this in two ways:
1. By checking out what new websites were submitted to the search engine’s “add url” form.
2. By following links from other websites.
Most SEO agree, that search engines somehow add websites to their index at a faster rate if it was found via method number 2. The logic to this is that if an old website links to a new website then the new website must have some good content in it. Of course this is not always true but it works.
When a search engine spider pays your website a visit, it immediately gets to work and wastes no time chatting around. It first sends a copy of your website to the search engine database for later analysis.
After doing that, it immediately checks out all the links in your website.
The links I’m referring to are the HTML links that you have all over your
site.
Note: that search engine spiders with the possible exception of Google will only follow HTML links. Links found in Flash animations are not crawled at the moment again.
So, back to the spider. Each time it finds a link on your site, it pays that a visit as well. If it finds that the page has changed, it immediately sends the new copy over to the search engines for re-analysis. This brings us to the next point.
Search engine spiders will always come back to your website but there’s no regularity to it. There is however a tried and tested way to keep them coming back more often and that is to update your website regularly. This means that it is very important to keep your website fresh and updated
because…
SPIDERS DON’T WANT ROTTEN FOOD!
Yes, if a spider revisits your page and don’t see any changes, it takes note of it and reschedules for a next visit. If your website is still unchanged when the spider revisits, then it lowers the frequency of its revisit.
Updating your website once or twice a week should keep the spiders interested with what “food” you have to offer them. They’re like gods that have to be pleased with fresh virgins regularly so you might as well just give them that.
What I want you to do now is go to your blog and freshen it up a bit. Add some new content to it. After that, I’d also want you to create an “update schedule” for you to follow.
Now that you know what search engines want, how they work and how to feed those critters, I mean spiders, you’re quite ready to hone in your skills.