Whether you’re just starting on the great search engine optimisation adventure,
or you’ve been doing it for some time, there are a lot of terms and expressions
thrown around that don’t immediately make sense. In fact, at first glance,
it seems like SEO has its very own development language with expressions like
spiders, bots, algorithms, crawling, and indexing being among the first words
you’ll probably hear but are unlikely to understand straight away.

Search Engine Spiders And Bots

Search engine optimization is primarily about pandering to the requirements
of the search engines. In order to help them determine whether your site is
relevant to a particular keyword and whether it deserves to be ranked highly
or not, the search engines deploy small pieces of script. These are referred
to as either spiders or bots. They are called spiders because they are said
to crawl around the web while the term bot is used as a shortened version of
the word robot.

Search Engine Algorithms

An algorithm is a mathematical equation that is used by search engines to
give your page a “rank”. This rank compares your page to other pages on the
web to determine which ones should be displayed for a given search term and
in which order. The algorithms used are complex, regularly change, and are
a closely guarded secret by the search engines themselves. Search engine optimisation
is about taking an educated and largely tested view on what the algorithms
are and then optimizing a site accordingly.

Crawling

Search engine spiders crawl the web, going through every page and following
every single link that they can find on each of those pages. When they find
a new link, they transmit details back to the search engine and then continue
on their journey. In search engine optimisation terms, this means that a web
site needs to include navigation from page to page that is easy for the
spiders to follow. Typically speaking, this means using text links because
these are the types of link that spiders can follow.

Another consideration of crawling is that your website first needs to be discovered
by the search engines. Early stages of search engine optimisation link building
ensure that this can happen by garnering your pages with inbound links from
other sites.

Indexing

Search engines index every page that their spiders crawl. A numerical value
is assigned to each page in the index for each search term that is relevant
to that page. When a surfer then conducts a search, the result pages display
the index in order of the most relevant and valuable first. Being indexed high
in the rankings is one of the goals of SEO and helps to ensure greater traffic
levels.

Understanding SEO

SEO, or search engine optimisation, can appear a complex subject at first
glance. While it is true that there are many different facets to an SEO campaign,
by understanding some of the more baffling and widely used acronyms and terms
it begins to make much more sense. Spiders and bots are nothing more than bits
of code or software applications, while indexing is the act of listing pages
according to the rank that they are given using search engine algorithms; mathematical
equations used to determine the relevance and value of a given page.