The most successful online businesses have one thing in common: they know how to make search engine optimization work for them.
Search engine optimization is both the art and science of making websites appealing to internet search engines. The first step toward strong search engine optimization is attracting search engine web crawlers to your website. Web crawlers are computer programs search engines use to gather data and index information from websites. The information they collect helps determine a webpage’s ranking.
One of the quickest ways to slow down a web crawler is to build a website with frames. Most search engines have crawlers that cannot penetrate frames. If they cannot access a webpage to read it, that page remains unindexed and unranked. Two search engines, Google and Inktome, have web crawlers that are capable of penetrating frames. Before submitting your website to a search engine, do some research to find out whether its crawler can get through frames.
If you have written frames into your URL, it will probably be worth the effort to go back and rewrite your URLs. Once you do, you may be surprised to find that the new addresses are easier for people as well as web crawlers. Frameless URLs are also easier to type into documents as links and references.
After rewriting your URLs, it is time to start submitting your website to search engines. Some webmasters prefer to use an automated search engine submission service. If you choose a submission service, be aware that there will be a fee involved. The minimum fee is typically fifty-nine US dollars. This price should keep a few URLs on the search engines for a year. Other webmasters prefer to avoid larger fees by submitting their websites to individual search engines on their own.
Once your webpage has been submitted to a search engine, you need to sit down and create a crawler page. A crawler page is a webpage that contains nothing except links to every page on your website. Use the title of each page as the link text. This can also give you some extra keywords that may help improve the ranking crawlers assign to your website. Think of the crawler page as a site map for the rest of your website.
Typically, the crawler page will not appear in search results. This happens because the page does not have enough text for crawlers to give that individual page a high ranking. After all, it is nothing more than a portal to the rest of your site, and your human users will not need to use it. Do not panic if crawlers do not appear to index your website right away. There are many websites on the internet that need to be crawled, indexed, and ranked. It can sometimes take up to three months for a web crawler to get to yours.
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