| Similarly, other search engines, such as Yahoo, Bing/Live/MSN*, and all the rest use their own spiders to compile and update their
indexes.
But what makes these search engine spiders so important?
Also known as ‘web crawlers’ or ‘bots’,
search engine spiders are amongst the most essential visitors
to any site. since they index and classify its content
for inclusion in search engine databases. It must be noted that these bots do not see pages in the
same manner human visitors do. Rather than simply reading text and picture content, spiders
scour a page’s HTML code to extract usable information.
Consequently, poor web design techniques and coding standards
can be a serious hindrance to their efforts,
sometimes causing them to give up entirely.
JavaScript, especially, is a severe impediment to search
engine spiders trying to index your site. Any web page source code with JavaScript-based content is likely
to send bots running for cover without ever indexing the
page in question at all. Other main culprits include missing image alt attributes, which, although not likely to
cause a major disturbance to the average surfer, are a real headache for web crawlers, simply because it cannot actually tell what an image is about without little descriptive hints, such as alt attributes and image captions.
A question of balance?
If a site is designed solely with search engine spiders
in mind it is likely to lead to a poor user experience
for its human visitors, whereas if it is only geared towards
the human eye it may well suffer from poor search
engine rankings. The necessary balance can only be achieved through high standards of
code which provide a search engine friendly base, easily
indexed by web crawlers.
The perfect starting point is provided by the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C), an organisation which has been setting
coding standards for the internet since 1994. Although is still a mystery to many web
designers, its importance to achieving long-term success
with the major search providers cannot be underestimated.
What You See Is Not Always What You Actually Get
Anyone who has ever used Microsoft FrontPage™ will
know that a working knowledge of HTML is no longer necessary
to create a website; the program does the hard work.
What most users fail to realise is that WYSIWYG* web design techniques
employing the use of such programs as Microsoft FrontPage™ or
Macromedia DreamWeaver™ tend to produce messy, non-compliant
code which may look great onscreen but might also hamper
the efforts of search engine spiders, if the code in question is sufficiently broken. |
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* Bing is the latest in a series of Microsoft search incarnations, and though it is basically branded as a New Kind of Search Engine, and a Decision Engine, it is basically nothing but an evolution of the MSN/Live search infrastructure with a different name.
* WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Ge
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