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Getting people to a website is a major concern for all designers and search engines are the key to achieve this goal.
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There are thousands of search engines out there, but only a few major ones (and that's not taking into account the human edited directories). The most important ones are:
Most of your visitors will probably find you through one of these six. In addition to these big ones you may want to submit to a few search engines that are more specialized. You can submit your site by hand, or you can find a free submission service. Some design programs have the ability to submit to search engines, if your software is recent enough it may be a good option, but keep in mind that, if the search engine changes its submissions process, you may believe that you've submitted your site to a search engine when in fact your submission went nowhere. Not all search engines will confirm a submission so using a design program to submit your site should only be done under the following circumstances:
And since we are on the subject of where to submit, you may also want to consider submitting your site to Alexa. It's not as widely used as the others, but it is the engine that maintains the "way back machine". |
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Spiders are agents sent by the different search engines to crawl the web in search of pages to add to their databases. They are, essentially, automated browsers but they are also fairly primitive browsers. An example of this is the fact that while only about 2% of web browsers out there are incapable of displaying frames, a number of spiders still can't handle them (more on this problem later). A spider visits a home page, scans it for links, and adds those links to its list of sites to visit, then it moves on to the next page. Once a page has been visited by a spider, it is added to the search engine's database, and from there it can be found by users. This process is not instantaneous, it takes anywhere from a couple of days to a few months for a site to get listed, but that is the basic system (OK, it is a little more complicated than that, but that's an effective working explanation, let's not get too technical). |
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Meta tags are a series of tags that are added to the <HEAD> section of your html file. These serve to describe the document and its contents, but they have no impact the page itself. These tags are invisible to your visitors but they are critical for spiders. There are several different tags, among these description, keywords, URL, robot, author and copyright are some of the most relevant ones. The structure of a meta tag is quite simple: <META name="**" content="**"> Under META name you define what kind of meta tag you are creating (keywords, description, author, robot, etc.) and under content you include the text you want the spider to read in that meta's category. That's it. Don't let anyone scare you into believing that they are this daunting obstacle that you must overcome. You can add your meta tags by hand or you can use a program designed specifically for this purpose. Most advanced editors will ask you to fill in some basic information and help you generate the appropriate meta tags. Different spiders will handle meta tags differently. Not all spiders will focus on all tags, and some will ignore them altogether, but they are still necessary. Here you have a quick priority guide of the most important meta tags:
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Having said all that, the most important thing you have to keep in mind is that spiders aren't people. Yes, making your site spider friendly is relevant when it comes to getting hits, but designing your site for those same spiders can easily turn against you if your site is not appealing to humans. A spider has no way of knowing, for example, is the site's navigation is intuitive or not, it merely scans for all links and follows them blindly. A spider doesn't care how your site looks, or what it says. You should design your site for people, forget all about spiders, and only when you are done with your site's design should you take the appropriate steps to make your site spider friendly, add meta tags and so on. While it may be true that designing for spiders can help you get people to your site, and it can inflate the numbers in your counter, that should not be your main goal. It means nothing if your visitors don't find your site to be useful. Also be realistic, keep in mind that, if you are designing a small site, chances are you won't be able to compete with the big guys for the top placements in major search engines. Simply put, you lack their advertisement budgets and resources. For small sites word of mouth can be almost as important as search engine placement. |
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This is probably the best known example of the conflict of interest between people and spiders, though it is not the only one. Frames can make life a lot easier for your visitors (and especially for you), if they are well implemented, but the fact is that spiders don't like them at all. Simply put, the <frameset> tag significantly alters the structure of the document, and that is the root of the problem. The proper use of meta tags, and of the <no frames> tag can help matters with most spiders. For more information on this subject see To Frame or Not To Frame? A Designers Moral Dilemma. Also, spiders don't like cgi scripts (or any other kind of script for that matter), image maps and dynamically generated pages any better than they like frames (in fact they often like them even less). These are all examples of why sometimes you may be forced to choose between designing for people and designing for spiders. |
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This is an alternative to the robot meta tag. It is a very simple text file that tells search engines what to craw through. It can also tell them NOT to crawl through your site, to avoid certain areas or to disallow certain spiders. Keep in mind that robot.txt can be extremely sensitive, here you have an example of just how delicate they can be: User-agent: * Disallow: Tells all search engines to crawl through your entire site, but: User-agent: * Disallow: / will keep your entire site from being indexed. A good standard would probably something like this: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ It would enable all search engines to scan your entire site, except for your cgi-bin directory. |
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Now don't panic. I know this can look more than a little scary, but eventually it gets to a point where it actually makes sense (sort of).
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