7 Tips for Making Your Website Spider Friendly
If you know how Google works then you should know what a spider is. A spider is a program created by Search Engines to find different websites. A spider is also called as crawler or bot. So the web spiders are the programs which help Google or any other spider based search engines to find various websites spread across the web. The websites collected by these spiders are saved into the database of Google which is called as index.
So if you wish your website to appear in Google search results your first job is to make your website spider or crawler friendly. This article would throw some light on things you should do to make your website easily accessible by search engine spiders or crawlers.
- Create a Robots.txt file:
This is the first thing the spiders would look for when they visit your website. A robots.txt file set down rules as to which pages the spider should not visit. Can you imagine your digital downloadable products links appearing in Google search? What will happen? Nobody will buy your products as they would be available free of cost in Google. Don’t worry, it never happens like this. Because the ecommerce programs modify the Robots.txt file mentioning your product or theme folders as not accessible by spiders.
The web crawlers would fetch Robots.txt file before they visit any other file on your website. They would follow the restrictions as specified in robots.txt file & then start following other pages. If your website doesn’t have robots.txt file the crawlers would assume that you wish them to visit all the pages of your website & they would crawl your entire website. By creating a robots.txt file you make crawling process easier for spiders.
The robots.txt file is placed in root directory like http://www.example.com/robots.txt
- Use Meta Tags
You should use Title tags & description tags wisely. Make sure that these tags exactly describe your core nature of business & should include your important keywords. Most of the spiders ignore keyword tags now a days. So don’t include keyword meta tag.
- Create Great Contents
Quality & frequency of the contents is important. Add fresh new content to your website frequently. Frequent content addition would invite the spiders frequently to your website & would help you get better SEO results. Keep your contents always updated & try to make it as useful as possible for the website visitors. Don’t try keyword stuffing just to attract spiders. You may get negative SEO results.
- Create & Submit a Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of all URLs on your website. You should create a sitemap & submit it to Google. This would help Google spiders to find all of your contents which would in turn help you to get better SEO rankings.
- Limit the use of Java scripts & Frames
The spiders can’t read java scripts & frames. So keep the number of java scripts & frames on your website to minimum required. If you use them too much then the spiders won’t be able to read most of your website contents.
- Limit the use of Flash
Using flash you may create a very attractive websites but the crawlers can’t read flash. If possible, do not use flash on your website or keep it to minimum.
- Use Alt tags in Images
Spiders can’t read images or text within the images. So it’s highly recommended that you use Alt tags in all your images. Alt tags describe the image. Alt tags inform the crawlers what the image is all about. Also using Alt tags in images also helps human visitors to read what an image is about in case the web browser could not load the images.
If you follow all these things your website becomes highly eligible to be indexed fast by the search engines.
Conclusion
We should use the techniques discussed above to make our websites spider friendly for achieving better SEO results.
There are other things also that you should do to achieve good page ranks & SEO but making your website crawlers friendly is the first step toward your main goal of high page ranks in search engines.