How to Get Spidered
How Do Search Engines Work?
In simple terms, most search engines use 'spiders', 'robots', 'web crawlers' - there's a whole host of different terms - that trawl the Internet, indexing sites into a huge database, which when interrogated by the user, acts like a directory. An example would be a visit to Google, typing in 'bath taps' and the results reveal a list of best match web sites - ideally a list of bath tap supplied, but as mentioned earlier, there are no guarantees!
Search engines index web sites by using the text on each page, as well as the metatags and keywords that should be tagged to your web site. The text content of your site should contain relevant keywords in context. Search engines are continuously being optimised to actually search the contents of the web and this should be your starting point. The other side of this are the metatags which allow a summary and description of each page. These appear in the source of your web pages, i.e. 'behind the scenes' and are not visible to the user, and your web design partner should implement these on your behalf. In some cases, indexing by search engines can take up to 8 months!
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