Search Engine Spiders

How to invite computerized visitors to your site

If you have a world wide web, I guess you have to have spiders. Spiders are computers that browse the web to gather information about websites and report back to the search engine what they have found. Having a spider, pay a visit to your site is a good thing because it will help you to get listed in a search engine and thus spread the word about your site.

One of the best ways to get search engines to spider your site is by having other sites link to yours. Spiders follow links and if there are many links coming into your site then the chances improve that a spider will find your site.

On a similar note once one search engine spiders your site, other search engine spiders will eventually follow those links to your site as well.

If this sounds like a slow process, you are right. The world wide web is an enormous thing. Even if there are abundant links pointing to your site, it will take a while for spiders to get to your site and for the results to show up in search engines. How long exactly? This is hard to say, but count on a month at least and possibly much longer.

There are programs to pay for faster consideration, but for an artist the cost is not really worth it. So what is the best strategy for getting spiders to look at your site? Several of the search engines have links that allow you to invite spiders to come look at your site.

The following are links to forms that allow you to submit your site to search engines. The most important one is google which has an add URL page. Another one is AllTheWeb which powers the Lycos search engine. AllTheWeb also accepts submissions via its Add URL page. Another site submission form can be found at Alta Vista.

When going to these site submission forms be prepared to provide the following information about your site: Title, URL, description and sometimes keywords. You may also expect to encounter offers to list your site more quickly for a price. I would recommend the free services, which are just as effective if you are willing to be patient.

As mentioned above, links from other sites with related content are an effective way to get listed in search engines. If you are a member of a professional organization or an academic institution, find out if they have a site and inform them of your site. Often they will be happy to link to your site. There are also many community organizations and state funded sites which gather links of artist sites.

It is also worthwhile to note that search engines consider links from other sites to your site as another factor in deciding how to classify your site and weighting how important it is in relation to other sites. Many incoming links will improve your chances of a listing higher on the search results list. The key here is getting links from sites that are related to yours (i.e. art related sites).

The degree to which a link from another site will improve your search engine listing is based on how important that site is in the eyes of the search engine. For example if you want people to find your site by typing "abstract woodcuts", then a link from a site that is high on the list for a search on those terms would improve your rank on the list. Of course you must remember that your rank on the list will not improve at the time when the link is made, but rather when the link is spidered and the spider's results are compiled.