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Spiders_101_What_are_Spiders_and_How_do_they_Work
| Spiders 101 What are Spiders and How do they Work?
When I first came across this word “spiders”, I had no clue what
it was, what it did, or how it worked. (We’re not talking about
the hairy 8-legged creatures). I decided to conduct my own
research and to talk to some webmasters to get a better grip of
exactly what the purpose and function of spiders are. With this
knowledge and understanding of spiders, I thought I would share
what I have gathered on spiders. Let’s begin the Spiders
101 tutorial.
Spiders are applications that crawl (henceforth the definition)
the web, indexing and retrieving content, usually for the
benefit of search engines, information resources and news
organizations. As spiders travel, they become responsible for a
bit of traffic that gets counted in traffic statistics and ad
campaign reports. That still sounds a bit confusing after that
description, doesn’t it? Let’s break it down a bit to simplify
the process. Most of the
popular, heavy-traffic, search engines on the Internet today are
spiders or crawlers that move along the web in search of web
pages to index in their databases. Feed a
spider a single URL, (let’s say we’re trying to find discount
beauty salon equipment) and the first thing it will do with that
page is harvest all the links on that page and put them in a
queue for a future visit. This way the
movement of the spider is self-perpetuating as it is programmed
to visit these web sites, one by one in it’s queue. Then,
secondly, a crawler will make note of the title of the page. Once that is done, the crawler will ask itself,
“How relevant is the content of the page to its title.” Notice that the words: “discount, beauty, salon,
and equipment” appear in almost every listing, in either the
link text or the regular text. The words
appear over 100 times as a matter of fact, on that page. Now the search engine thinks this page is about
discount beauty salon equipment. It is now a
valuable, content-rich resource for those interested in discount
beauty salon equipment.
When you break it down, and see how the spider operates in a
step-by-step format, it is now easier to understand how spiders
program and operate. Another thought to keep in mind is that
spiders help your positioning or ranking in the search engines
based on the keywords you select. That’s why choosing a correct
set of keyword phrases is paramount to your website achieving
top ranking in the search engines. (Notice that I didn’t say in
the top 10). That is because getting great positioning in the
top 10 search engines is next to impossible. Let’s hope that
this little 101 on spiders will help you achieve the best,
realistic positioning in the search engines as possible.
About the author:
Joelene Orlando is a Web enthusiast and a staff
writer/consultant for eMarketing Answers with a broad knowledge
of topics covering Internet marketing and communication
strategies for both consumer and small business
owners.http://www.emarketinganswers.com is dedicated to
providing free, comprehensive emarketing resources and online
promotion tools.
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