May 12th, 2010 by Dan

Sadly, unlike the rather futuristic images conjured up by their name, search robots are nothing more than pieces of software. Thinking about the humanoid robots seen in science fiction films, one would expect them to be able to look at web pages in a way similar to humans, and it is tempting to imagine that contemporary search robots can too. SEO company professionals know the truth is much more mundane, for the moment at least.

Search robots, also known as bots, crawlers and spiders, are limited in what they can ’see’ on a website. This means it makes sense for SEO to tailor web pages carefully to suit the robots’ needs. As they can generally only read ordinary text contained within the HTML of a page, any important content should be written in this form. JavaScript and Flash are fairly incomprehensible for search robots as are images, video and audio, so presenting words in any of these formats only makes sense for optional add-ons, rather than important content.

Another consideration is that anything search robots cannot see, people relying on screen reading software will also miss, and even now there are some web surfers without broadband who may leave images turned off for speedier browsing. In order to convey some information about images to cover all these scenarios, the use of the ‘alt’ attribute, a place in the HTML code where a text description can be inserted, is the solution.

It is possible to see just what is visible to search robots by opening a web page inside a browser window and selecting ‘view source’ from the menu of browser options. This will call up the HTML code corresponding to that web page, and it is this which bots are able to crawl.

The most important item on the page for search engine optimization is the title, which is the text contained within the title tags of the HTML. This title text is what is seen in the title bar right at the top of the browser window, when viewing a web page normally. It is given a lot of weight by search engines, and usually the same words are taken and used as the heading of the search listing belonging to that page. It makes sense to think carefully about page titles and place strong keywords within them, as search engines will give emphasis to these when indexing pages and drawing up search results.

A section of the HTML known as the ‘meta description’ is also quite critical, as what is written here can be used by search engines as the content shown in search results. Thus it makes sense to create a thoughtful piece of writing, summing up the main aspects of a web page, which, if this is a company home page, might include all the salient points about one’s business that a customer would want to know, such as the type of services or products offered, the location and other relevant details.

At SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk we make sure all our web pages are friendly to search robots.

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