The foundation of a successful SEO campaign is simplicity. The goal is to make a site easy to find, follow, and read for search spiders and live-visitors, along with well written topical content and a fair number of relevant incoming links.
In the simplest terms, search engines collate data about a website by sending electronic spiders to visit the site, copying its content which is then stored in the search engine’s database. Generally known as ‘bots’, these spiders are designed to follow links from one document to the next. The spiders index the site’s content (links, images and copy), developing a complex map of the site’s components. This is then stored and later accessed by users searching relevant content from the search engine.
Understanding spiders and how they read information from a site, is the technical basics of search engine optimisation or SEO. Spiders are designed to read site content like you and I read a newspaper, starting in the top left hand corner, a spider will read site content line by line, left to right, top to bottom.
Once a search spider finds a site, helping it get around is the first priority. One of the most important basic search engine optimisation or SEO tip is to provide a clear path for spiders to follow, starting from “point A” through to “point Z” of your website. This is best accomplished by providing easy to follow text links, directed to the most important pages in the site. One of these text links should lead to a text-based sitemap. The sitemap is a list (or directory map) that provides a text link to every page of the site. The sitemap can be the most basic page in a site as its purpose is primarily to direct spiders, rather than help lost site visitors.
Link building is an important part of boosting a sites ranking within a search engine. Some SEO experts refer to linking campaigns as ‘marketing’ or ‘promotion’, but fact remains; link building aids search engines in gauging the popularity of any site on the web.
