Any business is presented with the challenge of getting known. It must announce to the world that its doors are open to the world, ready for business. On the Internet that means getting listed in the search engines, so the people looking for a solutions will find one’s business offerings toward that solution. Consider the time and money invested in building an Internet presence, one’s place in the search engines should be of paramount importance. That can only happen by using the search engine’s spiders to the business’s advantage. A spider is a program that follows the links on web pages as they spread out to make up the World Wide Web. They follow links to others pages, make a record of the content, and then travel to the next pages using the links from that page.

Another way search engines gather information on websites is to allow website owners to manually submit their pages for placement. Though this would seem the quickest way to get a website listed in search engines, it may not be the optimal way to get a search engine to visit your website. Submitting manually is giving your website to search engines without context. With spidering a search engine can know the popularity of a new site, which pages are important, and the context of the site (subject manner). The search engines know this by how many links are sent to which pages, how many different sites are linked to the site, what the text is being used to reference the website (the anchor text in a link), and the subject matter of the webpage linking to the website (does the subject matter relate to each other?).

So, getting spidered and getting links go hand in hand. There are things to know about search engine spiders that will make getting listed easier. Start linking building with high traffic, frequently updated websites. These web sites get spidered more often, even if not daily. Meaning that a web site will be used placed in a search engine quicker this way, than the thousands of sites submitted cold to search engines everyday. Article directories are a good source to build links from sites that get spidered often.

Another thing to know is to attend to the business’s website sitemap. A sitemap is a single, plain webpage that lists every other page on the website. It gives the search engine spiders a single source to collect that website’s content. That single source also let’s spiders know when new pages have been added, keep it updated. Also, list on every page of the website a link to the sitemap so spiders can find it (visitors use it too). Most web sites list the sitemap at the bottom of the pages along with the terms and conditions, privacy statements, etc.

Knowing about the search engine spiders will help get a website listed more rapidly. Thereby, getting more traffic to a new website sooner.