The Architecture Of The Web And The Role Of Web Crawlers

Search engines have limited capabilities of indexing the web and interpreting the information they crawl. Web pages may look different to search engines than they look to humans. This article is going to shed some light into building web pages that cater to search engine crawlers and also real human visitors. Feel free to share this information with your web designers, IT managers or programmers, as all teams involved in the building and maintenance of a website should be on the corresponding wavelengths when it comes to creating a useful and compelling resource for your target market.

Use Indexable Content

HTML is arguably the best format for web pages, the language that helps them produce better results in the SERPs. Search engine crawlers may encounter difficulties in reading Flash files, Java applets or various images. Sometimes, search engines choose to ignore what they can’t understand. The best way to increase your chances of climbing to the top of the SERPs is by placing your most important and most relevant keywords in the HTML code of your pages. At the same time, you should use some advanced methods of letting search engines know what your images are all about:

  • Always use alt tags for images. These tags should contain a description of the main visual elements in the image, as search engines may read and use this information when they index and rank your images.
  • Add crawlable links and navigation to all pages.
  • Add text to your Flash and Java plug-ins
  • Provide a brief summary or a transcript of your audio and video files, in order for the search engines to be able to index them properly.
  • We take care of all of these with our QuikGrid SEO specialty services

Crawlable Link Structures

Search engines have to be able to see and understand the content before indexing and ranking it. Similarly, they have to view the links before following them. A crawlable structure is the one that enables search engine spiders to find all pages of a site. You need to structure your navigation is such a way that all pages of your website are interlinked. You can’t imagine how many websites make the mistake of not structuring the navigation correctly.

Let’s see some of the reasons why a web page may be beyond the reach of crawlers:

Links in JavaScript code that can’t be parsed

Some web developers use JavaScript for their links, without taking into account the fact that most crawlers have difficulties in seeing these links. Even when they see them, they may give them only a minimal amount of weight. Always use HTML code for your links, as this is the best way of increasing your chances to have all pages of your website indexed by search engines.

Links that point to blocked pages

The role of the Meta Robots tag and of the robots.txt file is to allow webmasters decide what pages shouldn’t be crawled by search engines. It is possible that you unintentionally include some restrictions that might prevent some of your pages from getting indexed.

  • Other various reasons such as frames, iframes, submission-required forms and pages with huge numbers of links.