by Marco Angioni II

Created on: August 09, 2010

A search engine spider “crawls” or searches the Internet for webpages to include in the search engine index.  Search engine spiders are constantly searching for new websites to include.  However, if your website code is difficult to read or is not setup in a “spider friendly” manner, it will take much longer for your website to appear in the search engine indexes, or not all of the pages on your website will be included.  Fortunately, you can correct this problem by making your website’s code “spider friendly.”

You can utilize two easy methods to make your website code “spider friendly.”  Those two methods are through the use of meta tags and through the use of a site map.

Meta tags are lines of code in your website that are not visible to your website visitors, unless such visitors are viewing the source code of your website.  Meta tags essentially describe the webpages to the search engine spiders.  By providing the webpages to the search engine spiders, the spiders will have an easier time indexing and finding your website.

In addition to describing your website to search engine spiders, meta tags provide a list of keywords for the search engine spiders.  This list of keywords makes it easier for the search engine spiders to index your website because you are providing the list of keywords under which to index your website. 

It is important to note that your meta tags should not include an extreme amount of keywords.  If your meta tags have too many keywords, the search engine spiders will consider your website to be a “spam” website and will give your website very low relevance.  If this occurs, your website will appear very low in the search engine results list.

Site maps are helpful because they inform search engine spiders of all of the webpages attached to your website that need to be crawled.  As such, a site map essentially informs a search engine spider of all of your webpages, so that they can all be included in the search engine index.  A site map also makes it easier for a search engine spider to maneuver through your website.  This means that your webpages will be found more easily and quickly.

Meta tags and site maps are easy to create and make your website code “spider friendly” so that a search engine spider can easily find your website and index it.  Meta tags describe your website to the search engine spider and provide it with a list of keywords so that the spider can index your website under those keywords.  Site maps help a spider navigate through your website and find all of the webpages attached to your website so that all of your webpage will be indexed in the search engine.

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