What Search Engine Spider Software Looks For
All the search engines look at the words in a web page and record where they found the words. Each search engine has a different way at looking at the web page. Some of the parts are the same for each of the search engines and some parts of different. One way to be sure to keep them all happy is to cover your bases.
Head Section of Your Web Page
The head section of a web page is at the top of the web page coding. It has an opening and closing tag.
<head>
(contents of the head section go here)
</head>
The head section of the web page contains the following tags:
The page title
The page title is contained between the <title> and </title> tags.
<title>What Search Engine Spider Software Looks For</title>Keyword meta tag.
Keywords and phrases are contained in the keyword meta tag.
<meta name="Keywords" content="keywords and phrases go here">Google says they do not use meta keywords for their web search. Bing looks at this tag for spammy contents. Spammy contents are keywords/phrases being over used or not on the page at all.
Going through the process of selecting keywords/phrases is still good. There are lots of spiders/bots out there searching the web. You never know if your site could be picked up to be included in their listings. Plus, the task of selecting keywords helps you focus on the topic of the page. A focused page will do better than one that is all over the place.
Depending on how your search function works, it could also use the meta keywords tag as part of it's process of sorting and finding results for you visitor's search.
Description meta tag.
Page descriptions are contained in the description meta tag.
<meta name="Description" content="Description of web page">
Note: All the major search engines reserve the right to show the web page title and description they feel best suits the user's search therefore, do not get upset when you see how your page(s) are doing for a certain search and the results do not show your title and description as you wrote them.
The robots instructions.
Robot instructions are contained in the robots meta tag
<meta name="Robots" content="index,follow">A website owner would use this tag if they do not have access to creating a robot.txt file or want to exclude a specific page from being indexed.
The Contents of Your Web Page
Page headings.
Headings and subheadings are contained between the heading tags.
<h1>Heading 1</h1>
<h2>Subheading - H2</h2>Keywords and Phrases
Keywords and phrases noted in the keywords and description meta tags.
The search engine spider will take note of where and how the keywords and phrases you included in the keywords meta tag are used within the web page content.
Image alt attribute.
Image alt attribute is the alternative text for the image. It is meant for those who use assistive technology to read web pages to them, for those who choose to surf with images turned off and will appear if your image is missing for some reason.
<img src="images/200x50image.gif" width="200" height="50" alt="200 x 50 image">The wording in the image alt attribute should describe what is in the image. You can use a keyword/phrase in your description but do not fill this attribute with keywords (a.k.a. keyword stuffing). It is acceptable to leave this attribute empty for decorative images.
Text links.
Text links are hypertext links that are actual words, not image links.
<a href="path to linked item">Text which is linked</a>Do not use click here or similar unclear phrases as text links. This does not help the user nor does it help the SEO (search engine optimization) of your page.
Text link title attribute.
The text link title attribute is contained within the text link coding.
<a href="path to linked item" title="Page title linked to">Text which is linked</a>When the user puts their mouse over the link the link title attribute will appear. Some refer to this as a tool tip.
Check the Webmaster Guidelines
Each of the major search engines have guidelines for you to follow. Read each of them and make notes of what each one looks at.
Learn to Optimize Your Pages for SEO
To learn how to properly optimize your web page content, meta tags and web page title, we recommend:
- SEO Techniques - Step by Step An ebook with 20 chapters of step by step instructions and resources needed to optimize web pages for search engine placement.
- SEO Training Class This free search engine optimization class via Yahoo groups is where you can work step by step to learn how to optimize web pages and obtain help as lessons are posted.
If you found this web page a useful resource for your own website please link as follows:
All the search engines look at the words in a
web page. Each search engine has a different way at looking at the web
page.
URL:
