March 9th, 2010 by Nick

To understand the value of dynamic, ongoing search engine optimisation, we have to think about how search engines (let’s say Google for now) index content and create search rankings and a little about how the web works. The obvious feature of the internet is an almost unthinkably massive network of pages, some with links to others. The page contents changes all the time, links break and form every day. Google needs to know what’s on all those pages so it can decide which ones are relevant to a search.

No search engine can keep a full database of the best answers to every search query. The internet is changeable, and what’s more, research has shown that up to 25% of all searches done today will be unique, with a combination of terms not searched on before. The search engine stores some information about a site, including keywords, maybe some content, what and who it’s linked to, and how an estimate of trustworthy and how important it is on the grand scheme of the internet. How does it get this information? Not by hand, that’s for sure.

Along the threads on the web- the links between websites- crawlers and bots travel. These are simple creatures made of code, that wander from one website to the next collecting information. There are two things to note about this process. One, if there are no links coming into your site, there is no route for the crawler to travel down and your SEO efforts will be fruitless (although you can still get listed by search engines if you ask them). The second is that this process of collecting information goes on all the time, and a busy site that is known to update frequently can be scanned several times a day.

A poor site without much SEO or interesting content might only be visited once a month. There aren’t many roads a crawler can stumble down and find it, and nothing new to see if it does. The better site, which has high quality content and good SEO, will have new information to collect and will also have a lot of high quality incoming links, which helps web crawlers to find it a lot.

How do we make these little code critters happy and send them back to Google full of exciting information about our site? Give them plenty of fresh content to scan! You’ll see a lot of recently updated blogs and articles on this site, and there are three reasons for that. The first is to give you- the searcher and reader- something useful and interesting to read, and that’s the most important. We also want a variety of resources covering all kinds of SEO, social media marketing, and online reputation management topics. We- and you- want to be an authority in our chosen field. The third reason is simply that fresh content is great SEO.

Keeping irrelevant content away from crawlers and bots is also important. Put things like terms and conditions under a nofollow link so they won’t rate them as part of your site, and keep Flash and other things they might stub their toes on off the main pages for the same reason. Making a good impression on automated web crawlers is just one part of an SEO strategy and using them is just one part of a search engine’s strategy, but it’s an important part.

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