Internet Marketing
SEO GUIDE

Robots

Description:Everyone wants their site to be ranked higher than it currently is. The amount of knowledge you have about how ranking is decided can help your case a great deal, and a good place to start is to learn about the role robots play in the ranking process.

The ranking of websites is and always will be a hot topic among webmasters the whole world over. Everyone is jostling for the top positions but not everyone knows exactly how the search engines decide which site goes where.

You may have heard of search engine spiders in the past, and you've probably got a mental picture of one crawling all over your site to see what it contains. Another name for a search engine spider is a robot, although the term spider seems to have stuck in common usage.

The reality of a robot is very different from the image. It's basically a program that collects information about websites and then reports back to its master (Google or Yahoo for example) with what it's found. The beauty of a robot is that it doesn't follow a strict preset pattern. If it visits a website and finds a link leading off to somewhere else then it will follow that, much the same as we start a search via Google and then wander from page to page and website to website via a network of links.

It follows therefore that if you want to increase your search engine ranking you need to increase the number of links on your site. More precisely, you need to concentrate on increasing the number of links leading to various pages on your site; you don't always have to link into the home page. Because the robots move across the web by finding and following links, it stands to reason that the more links you can create going to your website, the more chance there is of a robot finding one of those links and using it to reach your site.

The whole process of using robots to find information to add to the various search engines is quite logical; every time it finds something new it will report back with that information, which is why it pays to be constantly updating and amending your website to ensure the search engine robots visit it on a regular basis. The robots deem this kind of website to be a worthwhile one, as it is constantly growing and developing, adding new information and content that is of benefit to its visitors. This will ensure the ranking of that site will rise over time.

The key point to remember is to make sure that you are attracting the attention of the robots in the right way. Trying to get their attention by using underhand techniques such as cramming keywords into your pages wherever you possibly can will do nothing except bring your site to the attention of the search engines for all the wrong reasons. Do this and your site is likely to be banned.

In the final analysis robots can have a large say in what kind of ranking you manage to achieve. If you ensure your site is an active one and you work on generating plenty of links leading back to it from other reputable sites, you should see an improvement in your ranking once the robots find you and report back with your progress.