How Do Spiders Register Content?
So how do you get your web site up into those crucial first five - or better yet, first two - pages? Understanding how search engine spiders read and register the content in your articles will help you choose and place your private label articles to best effect.
Internet Spiders
Search engines are built around the technology of spiders - little software programs that follow links throughout a website, and take note of several factors. The way that your articles are structured, what keywords appear in them, where they appear and how often they appear throughout your web site are all key factors that get recorded when a search engine spider crawls through your web site. Other factors include which sites you link to, and what other web sites link to your pages. All this information, plus historical data about your page, is put together to determine how high your page ranks in a given keyword search.
To properly take advantage of what internet spiders can do for you, you need to select your articles with the search engine spiders in mind. It's important to select the proper keywords - the ones that customers would naturally choose to use to find you and your site specifically. For instance, if you're a florist in the Bronx who focuses on weddings, the articles that you choose to publish on your web site could include "Bronx florist", "wedding flowers", "bridal bouquets" and "Bronx wedding florist". The idea is to use key words and phrases in your articles that your customers would use in searching for someone that sells what you do.
Once you've determined what your keywords are, you need to place them properly. In your web page, there are specific places where a spider will give your keywords most weight. For Google search spiders (and for most of the rest of the industry), spiders focus on words in:
"
- Titles "
- Subtitles "
- Metatags (including keywords and description) "
- Linked text
Google spiders look at other things as well (we think including bullets, table headings, and image text tags) but the specifics of what they look for are a closely-guarded secret. After the four we're certain of, most webmasters experiment with different methods. Every SEO-optimization expert uses a slightly different method.
We also know that Google spiders seek out keywords in text like articles, and pay attention to where those keywords are. If you put all your keywords in your first paragraph, for instance, you'll get a lower ranking than if you had put the same number of keywords throughout your text; but keywords in the first and last paragraph of text seem to have a little more weight than those in the middle.
Clearly, optimizing keywords is a complex and confusing topic. But you don't have to get it perfect if you have the right keywords and if you're focusing on a niche market like you should.
Optimizing Your Site
Outside your website, we know that the number of links to you from other websites does raise your ranking, and the frequency with which you put fresh content on your site (especially the home page) also affects it. Sites that update at least once a month seem to perform better in the Google listings dance, so it's evident that having a body of relevant articles to which other webmasters will link, and updating that content with new articles frequently is a key factor in getting your web site noticed by the Google spiders.
Inside the website, there are a several things you can do to ensure that your website gets the best ranking possible. The most important of these is the placement of the keywords you've selected. Your keywords should be used in metatags on EVERY page in your web site - specifically in the title, description and keywords. In addition, be certain to use your keywords naturally in ALT tags on your images. You might, for example, use the ALT text "Bridal bouquet designed by Bronx wedding florist" for a photo of a bride carrying a bouquet. Use headings in your articles rather than simply bolding text - it appears that spiders pay attention to H1-H6 tags. Including a site map linked to your first page - and linking to every other page on your site - will ensure that the spider finds all of your pages and articles with keywords in them.
Be certain with a new website that you submit it to the search engines. If you don't, and if no one else has linked to your website, the search engines can't find it! They must have either a submission request or a link from another site to you in order to find you online. Obviously, the more links to your web site from others, the better the chances of your site being found. The best way to make sure that you have plenty of incoming links is to provide up-to-date, frequently updated articles that are relevant to your web site's purpose. By providing a healthy body of private label articles that offer information that people want, you'll be encouraging other webmasters to point their readers at your web site with links to your articles - and waving a big flag at the spiders to stop here and read!