As a site owner, you want visitors. To get visitors, you need people who are searching for sites like yours to find your site first. That means getting properly indexed on search machines (“ranking high for your keywordsâ€). Which in turn means knowing how to handle search engine spiders.
Readers of this blog may have looked at my long article on search engine optimisation, on the main Web Costa Blanca site. You can also check out any earlier posts, by looking at the ‘Search engine optimisation’ category.
Here are two things you can do to catch spiders—before you write a single word of text or create a single graphic.
1. Name your files for spiders. Apart from your index page—and you can give that a different name by adding a rule to your .htaccess file, if you really want to—give all your pages names which spell out their content, using words that visitors might type into search engine boxes. For example: best-cheap-whatnots.html.
2. Write your titles for spiders. Use the same or similar words in your title tags. These appear in the browser’s title bar, at the very top of the display, and most human visitors ignore them. Spiders think they are crucial.
(Incidentally, some people use the same title tag on every page of their site. This may attract visitors to the site—but they may not get to the pages you think are important. There’s a lot to be said for varying title tags to get different visitors to different pages. This is up to you.)
Have fun!
