Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

Robots Deliver

We’re going to start with the basics of how the search engines work, and a major com-

ponent of this is a

robot,

spider

, which is software that slurps up your site’s text and

brings it back to be analyzed by a powerful central “engine.” This activity is referred

to as

crawling

spidering

. There are lots of different metaphors for how robots work,

but we think ants make the best one. Think of a search engine robot as an explorer ant,

leaving the colony with one thought on its mind:

Find food.

In this case, the “food”

is HTML text, preferably lots of it, and to find it, the ant needs to travel along easy,

obstacle-free paths: HTML links. Following these paths, the ant (search engine robot),

with insect-like single-mindedness, carries the food (text) back to its colony and stores

it in its anthill (search engine database). Thousands and thousands of the little guys are

exploring and gathering simultaneously all over the Internet. (See Figure 3.1 for a visual

example.) If a path is absent or blocked, the ant gives up and goes somewhere else. If

there’s no food, the ant brings nothing back.

Figure 3.1

Search engine robots at work

So basically, when you think of a search engine, you really need to think of a

database that holds pieces of text that have been gathered from millions of sites all

over the web.

What sets that engine in motion? A search. When a web surfer enters the term

“grape bubble gum” into the search engine, all of the sites that

might

be relevant for

Text info

Web pages

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