Ok, I will try and use a different approach now to many other descriptions of this topic.
First I would like you to imagine that you are a “SPIDER”. You can choose what kind of spider you want to be. For this purpose i will imagine I was a “Red Back Spider”.
Why Red back Spider? Well I live in Australia and Red Backs are kind of famous here!
So, you are a little spider, bored and have nothing to do. So you go online and search for some activities.
THEN… you see a big add by Google…”Looking for a cool spider, who can walk very fast, looks stylish and can follow instructions.”
Hmmm… “I am a cool spider and have all the qualities, plus I’m very bored.. so let’s apply”!
You apply for the job and guess what, you get it! Now you are a Google Spider!
After you get your induction, training and instructions you are all set and ready to work. So big old Google Boss sends you to crawl all over the internet, visit different websites and all their WebPages and report back what you have found! …. Pretty cool job, right!
Seriously, imagine in your head.. you are crawling all over the internet looking trough the eyes of the spider. What do you see? How does it all look?
You may wonder by now where is this guy going with this article!
It is very simple, I wanted you to imagine the above, to see the web trough the spiders eyes. The reason for this is that to be a good SEO or Search Engine Optimisation Guy, especially if you want to make a courier out of SEO, you need to be able to look at web pages with the eye of a search engine spider. Being able to do this will make your SEO life much easier.
I’m very confident that good SEO professionals out there will understand the above and they know what I’m talking about. However if you don’t the reminder of the article will hopefully make some more sense.
The Beginning
(For SEO Guys, this is a simple explanation and may be a little to simple, however I thought it is important for people who are not in the field and people just starting out. As I have come across websites trying to optimise the main page for ridiculous number of keywords. So please excuse if some of this is basic for you)
Before we go any further it is important to understand that search engines rank web pages and not web sites! This means that you can-not optimise your main page.. let’s say www.yoursite.com.au for 20 different keywords. Well you could, but it would become very hard and would almost need some “black heat” strategies to do so. We want to stay away from these, right!
The option here is to optimise different pages on your website for different keywords. For this example i will use the keyword “accountant Perth”
So you might have been lucky and bought the domain www.accountantperth(.)com. You could optimise the main page for “accountant perth” and “perth accountant”. So what do you do if you want to target “chartered accountant”?
Remember how I said that the search engines index web pages and not web sites? Well we just create another web page and target: “chartered accountant”. It may look something like this: www.accountantperth(.)com/chartered accountant
Then with some optimisation, this page will rise in relevance for the specific keyword we are targeting. The search engines will show results (your URL’s) of specific pages when someone searches for your service and not just the main URL or your root domain.
Seeing Graphics And Cool Scripts!
We all use JavaScript and various images to captivate our visitors and make them interested. However the search engines do not see these items.
Back to you being a spider… imagine you go to a website while working for the big G… the website has some text that you understand. However it also has allot some weird code that means nothing to you… and you thing.. “This was not in my Google Spider Training”!
Well in this case the spiders cannot see images and JavaScripts. You are Image Blind! All you can see is some code that you can make little sense of. So you just report to Google what you could see.
Now if the webmaster or in this case SEO guy was smart enough, or knew his job. Then the images on the website would have been optimised so that you as a little Google Spider would understand.
In this case I will use an image that is on this website:
This image relates to Free Consultation. Now you as a spider would not know that unless I write and indicate this in the code that spiders do understand.
So the search engine spider will look at this and see: perth-seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Perth-Seo-Free-Consultation-2-262×145.jpg
See how in the code the image has the wording: Perth-Seo-Free-Consultation ?
You as the spider would understand that and you would report to the big G… “Hey big G, this image is about: Perth, Seo, Free, Consultation”
Where if the code was: perth-seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/image1-2-262×145.jpg
You as the little hard working spider would say: “Hey big boss G, this is about image1, it makes no sense to me!
It is important to remember; when a spider first visits a website it does not know what it is about. So it is in our best interest to put the details in place to help it understand as soon as possible.
Why did I say as soon as possible? It is written and believed that Search Engine Spiders have a limit on loading page content. It is believed that it will not read more than 120KB of your lovely page even though it is supposed to scan all the content. So it is very wise not to overdo and use too much script at the beginning of the page. Script like flash JavaScript etc.. As this can quickly use up the 120KB and the rest of your page may not be read.
That is why the above is important if you are using images in the beginning of your pages. Use the right code to tell the spider what this is all about. As if you don’t, and your flash and graphics use up the 120KB, the spider may not go far enough to find the keywords relevant to our web page and you may miss out…
Hope that this has helped you understand the life of the Search Engine Spider….
If you still like it, maybe you can look at Google classifieds to see if there are any Spider Jobs going J
Have a good day.
Alem – Perth Seo