Search Engine Optimisation
May 31st, 2010
In the simplest terms, search engines collate data about a website by sending an electronic spiders to visit the site, copying its content which is then stored in the search engine’s database. Generally known as ‘bots’, these spiders are designed to follow links from one document to the next. The spiders index the site’s content (links, images and copy), developing a complex map of the site’s components. This is then stored and later accessed by users searching relevant content from the search engine.
Understanding spiders and how they read information from a site, is the technical basics of search engine optimisation or SEO. Spiders are designed to read site content like you and I read a newspaper, starting in the top left hand corner, a spider will read site content line by line, left to right, top to bottom.
Search Engine Friendly Sites
Once a search spider finds a site, helping it get around is the first priority. One of the most important basic search engine optimisation or SEO tip is to provide a clear path for spiders to follow, starting from “point A” through to “point Z” of your website. This is best accomplished by providing easy to follow text links, directed to the most important pages in the site. One of these text links should lead to a text-based sitemap. The sitemap is a list (or directory map) that provides a text link to every page of the site. The sitemap can be the most basic page in a site as its purpose is primarilty to direct spiders, rather than help lost site visitors.
Basic elements a search engine looks at when examining a document
- After the URL of a site, the first information a search spider records is the “Title” of the page.
- Next, it examines the “Description Meta tag”. Both of these elements are found in the <head> section of the source code.
- Good content is the most important aspect of onsite search engine optimisation. The easiest and most basic rule of the trade is that search engine spiders can be relied upon to read basic body text 100% of the time. By providing a search engine spider with basic text content, SEOs offer the engines information in the easiest format for them to read.
- Keep it simple, some documents cover multiple topics on each page, which is confusing for spiders and User’s alike. The basic SEO rule here is if you need to express more than one topic on a page, you need more pages, creating new pages with unique topic-focused content is one of the most basic search engine optimisation techniques.
- Do your keyword research before you write your page copy, understanding how your audience searches is the most beneficial thing you can do for your website.
- The last on-site element a spider examines when reading the site (and later relating the content to user queries), is the anchor text used in internal links. Using relevant keyword phrases in the anchor text is a basic SEO technique aimed at solidifying the search engine’s perception of the relationship between documents and the words used to phrase the link, page linking and anchor text should follow a logical path A to B to C.