SPIDERS
A spider is an automated software program designed by search engines to follow hyperlinks throughout a website, retrieving and indexing pages in order to document the site for searching purposes. But what should concern a website designer is a spider’s nuances — a spider determines relevancy, i.e. if someone searches for “beeswax candles,” the search results will be only those web pages that contain the words beeswax candles.
That is simple enough, but suppose there are more than one website with the term “beeswax candles”? Search engine results are presented in descending order of relevancy to the search term that was used. Relevancy determines which results will be presented first, and which second, and on and on. The spider’s job is to work out which page is most relevant to the term “beeswax candles” and which is the least relevant.
Spiders calculate relevancy based on four factors: repetition, prominence, emphasis, and link popularity. Let’s examine each of these more closely.
Repetition. This is simply the number of times a word is repeated on the page. The more often it is repeated the greater is its relevancy to the page. But resist the temptation to simply repeat the “keyword” over and over again because spiders are programmed to de-list a web page if there are too many repetitions.
Prominence. This is where keywords appear within the website. Originally all a spider looked for was the “keyword” meta tag, but not any longer. Now they look in keyword meta tags, description meta tags, alternative text tags (on images), page titles, body text, and link text.
A spider is an automated software program designed by search engines to follow hyperlinks throughout a website, retrieving and indexing pages in order to document the site for searching purposes. But what should concern a website designer is a spider’s nuances — a spider determines relevancy, i.e. if someone searches for “beeswax candles,” the search results will be only those web pages that contain the words beeswax candles.
That is simple enough, but suppose there are more than one website with the term “beeswax candles”? Search engine results are presented in descending order of relevancy to the search term that was used. Relevancy determines which results will be presented first, and which second, and on and on. The spider’s job is to work out which page is most relevant to the term “beeswax candles” and which is the least relevant.
Spiders calculate relevancy based on four factors: repetition, prominence, emphasis, and link popularity. Let’s examine each of these more closely.
Repetition. This is simply the number of times a word is repeated on the page. The more often it is repeated the greater is its relevancy to the page. But resist the temptation to simply repeat the “keyword” over and over again because spiders are programmed to de-list a web page if there are too many repetitions.
Prominence. This is where keywords appear within the website. Originally all a spider looked for was the “keyword” meta tag, but not any longer. Now they look in keyword meta tags, description meta tags, alternative text tags (on images), page titles, body text, and link text.