SEO Basics: Understanding Spider Vision

Spiderman loves to swing around cities. But his brethren actually travel through websites! Spiders, also known as web bots, web robots or web crawlers, are what various search engines use to index your pages, which helps determine your website’s importance and relevance to search terms. However, as important as these programmed entities are, many people design websites that spiders can’t read.

Seeing Text

Web Spiders can only see the final end result HTML file. Whatever the PHP code generates or retrieves from the MYSQL database only matters as to what the final generated HTML file shows. This means that any Flash content and images are not readable by web spiders and that whatever content generated through media such as videos or music won’t help your search engine ranking. This is why all your written content should be in text and not placed on an image through Photoshop or some other image editing software. The one thing you can do for media files like images is to use the “alt” tag and give descriptions on what the media is about. However, all the description in the “alt” tag isn’t worth as much as actual text.

Frames, Flash, and other Creatives

The implications of what bots can see is: frames don’t work, and media should be minimized. Frames are essentially two different web pages displayed on one screen. It may look nice to the visitor but the web spiders treat the pages separately. This applies to iframes as well. As for media, if the bots can’t read it, if there is no difference to your visitors if you have text or media, then use text.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

Another thing is that spiders can only understand static URLs. The URL can’t be constantly shifting. There needs to be a permanent URL where the bots can always go and find the exact same page. One static URL should not generate different pages, as is the case with many e-commerce shopping carts as all of your products will be associated with one URL, which means that whatever the bot sees the day they crawl your product page is the only item that will be listed in their search engine.

In addition, despite the fact that many SEO firms split test and find that URLs with “?” and other symbols are still search engine friendly, it is best to keep clean URLs.

Note: Remember that what search engine bots like doesn’t necessarily equate to what your visitors like. If your visitors come for your Flash, videos, or images, then don’t change it.