| So, you spent a considerable amount of time designing | | | | that type of code, and you may be blocking them |
| your website. You have attractive graphics on display, | | | | from collecting your information for search. Be sure to |
| user-friendly navigation, perhaps a bit of Flash or | | | | allow room for spiders to move around. Keep |
| javascript to enchance the user's experience on your | | | | complicated code to a minimum or forgo it altogether. |
| site. The site's content is fresh, relevant, and original. A | | | | The cleaner a website's code is, the better a web |
| site such as yours should attract much attention in | | | | crawler can spider the site and gather relevant data |
| relevant search results, so why is incoming traffic so | | | | for caching. The more relevant, updated information a |
| slow? Why are the search engines not caching your | | | | seach engine spider gathers from a site, the better |
| information as quickly and as often as you would like? | | | | that site's chances are in search results. |
| You look at your website and wonder what could be | | | | A good way to determine whether or not your |
| wrong. On the outset, the site looks fine, but consider | | | | website is searchable is to have the code validated. |
| this: what the average Internet user sees is not what | | | | The W3C Validator is a free service recommended to |
| the search engine spider (or "bot") sees when it crawls | | | | validate site code and check for conformance to |
| the web to collect the data. The spider reads the site's | | | | W3C standards. The World Wide Web Consortium |
| code, all of the characters and data you or your HTML | | | | (W3C) is an international consortium where member |
| editor added to create the site. Oftentimes, a spider will | | | | organizations, a full-time staff, and the public, work |
| attempt to crawl a site only to become entangled in a | | | | together to develop standards for the World Wide |
| different kind of web! If there is one character out of | | | | Web. Simply enter your URL in the validator and a list |
| place, additional code that shouldn't be there, or code | | | | of errors, where applicable, will alert you to what |
| that is unreadable to spiders, your website just may be | | | | needs to be improved in the code of your site. Think |
| bypassed altogether. | | | | of it as fine tuning, it may take some time to improve |
| Remember all of those fancy Flash and javascript | | | | your site's code, but in the long run the increase in |
| doo-dads you implemented? Some spiders can't read | | | | search referrals will have made it work the hard work. |