The internet is a web. Along it crawl search engine spiders, creeping robots that infest your website and suck from it the tiny details that feed the search engines. The quality of the details they glean will determine the state of your rankings. In the normal scheme of things, you’ll put whatever details you can in the way, hoping that they will sate those robot henchmen of the search regime. Wouldn’t it be better, though, to have the search engine’s spiders do your bidding?
Training real spiders is a bleak and disappointing task, but robot spiders are surprisingly easy to control. All it takes is intelligent application of SEO tactics. To train search spiders, you have to know how to use the tools at your disposal:
*Robots.txt: If your amazing spider-taming show was in the big ring, your robots.txt file would be the whip. Any good SEO plan will use this to guide attention to the right pages, and right area of pages.
*Robots meta tag: The chair. Similar to robots.txt, but not favoured by everyone in SEO careers as it’s not as accurate.
*Page code: Finally, your page code is your body language with the spider. While knowing how to use the whip and chair will help keep your beast under control, neither are needed if you know how to send the right message.
Clever use of these can siphon attention to the information that will best suit your SEO plan, but it takes creativity and thought to do it well. Be proactive, and guide search spiders through your hoops.
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