Let the Spider Crawl

For most sites, one of the first things we check is to make sure the site crawler friendly. "Crawler friendly" you say? What the heck does that mean? Search engines find sites mostly by following links from sites that are already known to find new sites and pages. The sofware programs that search engines use to perform this task are often called "Bots" or "Spiders". You get the analogy right? "Web", "Spiders", "Crawl". If you don't make sure your site is crawable and indexed, then you're putting your web site at a gross disadvantage. For example, if you have a 1,500 page web site and only 700 pages are getting indexed, that's like showing up to a baseball game with only 5 of your players. You need the whole team to win, so make sure your site is crawlable and getting indexed properly. As search engine spiders crawl the links of your site, they make copies of the pages and then peform other functions that strip away the code, interpret the remaining text as well as other analysis that ultimately leads to a score for the page and association of the page to certain words. All of this along with links into your site from other web sites, influence your rankings. On the PPT MSN guidelines