Library
	Where to start
	How much
	Strategy
	Choose a designer
	Color Schemes
	Search Engine Spiders

Important links to help you start a business and grow your business

Search Engine Spiders

Somewhere, someone said "between 50 to 90 percent of traffic to a website comes from search engines". While the exact numbers are hard to verify, it's obviously important to get your site listed in search engines.

Secrets of the spider
Search engines use automated software programs called "spiders" to "crawl" across the world wide web to find websites. Once they find a website, they download the home page (same as you download a web page when you view it through a web browser), and then they save the page to a server at the search engine company's location.

In the nest
Later, back in the spiders nest, another kind of software program called a "robot", opens the file that the spider saved on it's server, and it reads the web page. As it's reading the page, it's counting every time a word appears on the page (called "indexing" - like an index at the back of a book). Once it has a count of all the words on a page, it uses filters (called algorithms) that eliminate common words (like "the", "at", "for", etc), so only "important" words remain.

Who's boss?
Now the definition of what is important is owned by the search engine company and the programmers who define the algorithms that do the filtering. In the past, savvy webmasters were able to get a high position in the search results by overloading the page with appropriate words that were important to their product or service. But the search engine programmers modified their algorithms, and now there are "legitimate" counts for how many times the word should appear on a page, along with the proximity of the words (for example, the phrase "lawn mowers, lawn mowers, lawn mowers" would be considered "cheating" and your page would be assigned a lower ranking in the results list.

Avoid the trap
Don't try to cheat the search engines. It will get you penalized in your rank position and possibly removed from the search engine database completely. Once that happens, getting your website back into their system is nearly impossible. So if you pay someone to get your site optimized for search engines, you better not make your choice based on the cheapest price, and get lots of references and verify their results first, because the wrong approach can ruin your site, and no money back guarantee can fix that.

What to do? The best way to ensure you get accurately listed in the search engines is to represent your web page as it's true self. We have had success with Google.com, the #1 search engine, simply by submitting our website URL to their spider (http://www.google.com/addurl.html, and then patiently waiting around 3 weeks for their spider to crawl our site. Of course it helps to construct the pages of your site in a search engine friendly way, but that is a whole other article in itself. Once a major search engine like Google crawls your site, the other search engines follow their lead. And you only have to worry about 8 major search engines, because that where 99% of your traffic will come from.

Through a spider's eyes
If you want to see what a spider / robot sees when it reads your web page, the website SearchEngineWorld.com has neat utility where you can type the URL of your webpage and it will show you the approximate results of how a spider sees your website for the purposes of indexing your site. http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi