I have drunk, and seen the spider
—William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene I
This quote seemed like a great lead-in to search engine optimization, one of the most important elements of marketing. If you don’t understand how it works, you’re doing your marketing and PR budget a grave disservice.
In a nutshell, the major search engines use spiders, robots (‘bots) and crawlers to continuously “crawl” the Internet visiting Web sites, copying the code on Web sites and indexing it. This index that is a database of all Web sites visited is what the search engines use to provide results when you search. It’s important that the crawlers find relevant information about you when they visit your site, because if your site isn’t in the index, searchers won’t see you in their search results. Instead, they’ll likely see your competition.
According to The Truth About Search Engine Optimization, by Rebecca Lieb , if you’d like to see what a crawler “sees” when it visits a Web page, try this: “Visit that page with Internet Explorer and press Ctrl-A to view the copy (Apple-U on a Mac). Or if you’re in Google, click on the cached link at the bottom of any search result to see the crawler’s most recent snapshot of the page.”
One way we “help” the crawlers is by posting our agency’s (and our clients’) latest news on our Web site. The most current news releases automatically show up on the home page. Because this information is updated frequently, our indexed information is strong and current and includes our latest services and achievements.
