Google currently is reported to have indexed 8 billion pages and counting. Google utilizes an array of bots A.K.A. spiders or crawlers.

Among the specialized bots Google uses include: The web spider Googlebot, the Adsense spider MediaBot, the image spider ImageBot, the AdWords spider AdsBot, the RSS feed spider FeedFetcher-Google, and Googlebot-Mobile spider for mobile devices. MSN & Yahoo, the other two of the ‘big three’ have their own proprietary versions of spiders.

Why is it important for an Internet Marketer to know how spiders crawl your website?

A search engine crawler is your best visitor. Giving a crawler easy and uninhibited movement in your website is necessary for good search engine rankings.

Your website must be spider (search engine) friendly if you want any traffic from the search engines. A search engine spider does not read your website the way we humans do. The spider reads web-page source code (HTML) that renders your page, therefore ‘bad code’ can be an impediment to the spider, sometimes causing it to give up crawling your website.

Spiders love content (text) and do not read JavaScript at all, therefore a website that is packed with images with no ALT tags to assist the spiders, and heaps of JavaScript may not be indexed successfully. So, when designing your website you must incorporate structural website design principals that elicit search engine friendliness.

An astute marketer should also desire to see how search engines see his or her site. This may be accomplished by a Lynx Viewer which is a text-mode web browser. Additionally, a Lynx Viewer can help you determine if your web pages are accessible to the vision impaired, an assemblage of visitors that should not be ignored —yes, there are millions of visually impaired people surfing the Internet regularly.

A quick search in Google for “Lynx Viewer” will yield numerous sources from which you can download this important tool for your use.

Even though you must design your website with your visitors in mind first, it is crucial that you accord the search engines top level priority too, since the vast majority of these visitors will arrive via search engines. Practice good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but not at the expense of your visitors’ experience — it is a balancing act that must be accomplished with prudence.

Also of significant importance is the fact that web browser standards are not yet fully harmonized. A web page that looks great in Internet Explorer might look atrocious in a Mozilla based browser like Firefox or Netscape. Additionally, with the proliferation of hand held devices for browsing the Internet, compliance with W3C standards is becoming more and more critical. A marketer must therefore be conversant with the intricacies of cross-browser design — designing for one browser (IE) is no longer ideal, as the Google backed FireFox is eating up Microsoft’s browser turf at an alarming rate.

Anybody can “whip up” a web page in FrontPage without sufficient knowledge of HTML, but may not be able detect and correct the messy code that FrontPage generates underneath the page, some of which is proprietary to Microsoft. Consequently a website that looks superb in Microsoft Internet Explorer may look and load dreadfully in Opera and/or some other browser, denying you visitor traffic.

Never use a Word Processor to design your website. Word Processing software generates tremendous amounts of code that is not search engine friendly. If you cannot hand-code using a text editor then it is necessary that you use authentic and industry standard web design software that incorporate the most up to date design principles. Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and the latest version of Microsoft FrontPage are good candidates with Dreamweaver getting my partisan nod.

A first-rate design strategy should include the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and valid XHTML, the most current in the HTML generation of standards. Websites designed in strict W3C standards tend to be lighter, faster and cross-browser compatible. This is not to insinuate that table based design is going anywhere anytime soon, for it is my humble disputation that if strict W3C standards were to be enforced in browsers, 95% percent of websites would go out of business, furthermore the lack of inter-browser synchronization just worsens things.

According to some surveys, more than 86% of all people arrive at websites through search engines. In 2006, PC World, arguably the most authoritative and widely-read computer and business magazine, reports that Google remains the site of choice for most surfers.

“The double-digit increase in online search activity marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Internet consumer behavior,” says Ken Cassar, senior director of analytics at Nielsen/NetRatings. “Online search is the primary tool most people rely on to do everyday research,” he says.

So, from a marketing perspective unless your site appears in the top 30 listings of the major search engines & directories, you will hardly get any worthwhile traffic. Therefore, Search Engine Positioning is vital to your marketing success on the web!

A top ranking in the search engines can bring you highly targeted traffic. If someone visits your site after searching for a product or service that you are selling, it means that he/she is interested in what you are selling and hence is a potential customer for you. Thus, search engines send pre-qualified customers to you.

You can sell virtually anything on the Internet, but in order to succeed you must bring “targeted traffic” to your website…. people who are ready to buy your products and services, the vast majority of who will arrive at your website through search engines. If your website is not designed suitably, Google and other search engines will disrespect your website. Respect brings in traffic which translates into the all important Dollars, “Kwacha,” Euro or whatever you wish to call money.

Remember, search engine bots are your most important visitors, you must seduce, “open your doors” and accommodate them in order to gain any measurable success in your Internet Marketing endeavor.

By James Opiko
James Opiko writes for AfroArticles.com. Get free: Online Coding Tools & Audio Code Generator for your website, emails & newsletters.

RSS is changing the way we consume information online. Instead of being overloaded with mounds of information in our inbox, we can pick and choose exactly which content providers we want to hear from.

On the other side of the story are the publishers. Not only is RSS changing the way visitors view information, but it is also opening up vast opportunities for publishers wanting to syndicate their content across the Internet.

RSS is turning into one of the most popular distribution channels for webmasters, publishers, article writers and news syndicators. With RSS, you have the opportunity to have a continual digital conversation with your readers. You can use RSS to syndicate a wide variety of media formats including text, video, and audio.

No longer is the Web all about text. You can use RSS to syndicate your very own talk show, weekly podcast, or a collection of video tutorials.

With over 100 RSS and blog search engines available online, it’s time that you started integrating RSS into your marketing mix. This article will outline how you can combine the power of RSS with your current marketing activities.

To begin, let’s start with email marketing. Some people have predicted that RSS will one day overtake email as the top communication model. However, this is not likely to happen considering the differences between these two technologies. Instead, the two should be combined to form a powerful marketing duo.

Email Marketing and RSS Intertwine
You can complement your email marketing campaigns with one or more RSS feeds. By providing your readers with alternatives, you will reach a much larger number of subscribers.

There are a number of ways that you can integrate RSS into your current email marketing campaign.

1. Use RSS to announce each new issue of your ezine. Announce your e-zine in your RSS feed as a single RSS content item. When your subscribers click-through, they can access your newsletter in full on your website, drawing additional visitors to your content.

2. If you are currently using email autoresponders, provide those very same autoresponders as RSS feeds. You can do this at http://www.zookoda.com .

Using RSS, you can syndicate a wide variety of content. One of the most obvious uses of RSS is to deliver content updates to your users. RSS is an excellent communication medium for delivering daily updates of your web site content. You can’t expect your visitors to come back to your site every day to check for updates, but with an RSS feed they can quickly pick up any changes that interest them.

However, this is just the beginning of what is possible with RSS.

Deliver Content Updates, News, and So Much More…
You can also use RSS feeds to deliver news announcements, forum discussion updates, new product releases, quick tips, quotes, new coupons, job listings, classifieds, and real estate listings.

RSS can even be used to deliver content that is not available on your site. Let’s face it, you cannot possibly publish all of the great information that is available on your site’s particular topic.

However, you can supply your users with a content aggregation service that directs them to the best content within your industry.

With all of the digital junk that is currently being delivered online, you would be delivering an extremely valuable service simply by syndicating the most important and relevant information within a particular niche.

Keep in mind that relevant information goes beyond whether or not the content relates to your visitors’ interests. Relevant information can also speak to each individual user. Just like email marketing, you can use personalization within your RSS feeds to increase your response rate.

Speak Directly to Your Visitors with Personalized RSS Feeds
One of my favorite examples of personalization can be found at Babycenter.com. As soon as you enter the site, you are asked for two pieces of information:

Your due date or your child’s birthday and…
Your email address

After you submit your information you start receiving a weekly e-zine that is relevant to your pregnancy stage or the age of your child. If you have a 2-year old, you’ll be receiving articles, tips and product recommendations for that age.

Do you see the power in this? By using profiling, webmasters are able to send information that is highly relevant to their readers on a case-by-case basis.

You could use this same idea with your RSS feeds.

Basic personalization might include elements such as the reader’s first name, while more advanced personalization might deliver personalized content, product recommendations and so on.

Once you have decided on what type of content you would like to syndicate, you must then start organizing content for your feed. If you want to use RSS to its full potential, then I would highly advise you to create multiple RSS feeds for your users.

Use Multiple RSS Feeds to Increase Your Exposure
You can do this by creating RSS feeds for each category of content you cover. This extends your reach and marketing capability. Do not pack all of your content under one generic RSS feed. This is not beneficial for you or your visitors. By breaking your RSS feeds into categories, your visitors will be able to tap into the exact information that they are looking for.

For example, visitors who only want to keep up with forum updates shouldn’t have to sift through articles, news, and other content.

When you begin marketing your RSS feeds, keep in mind that this is still a fairly new technology.

RSS Isn’t Quite Mainstream, So Educate Your Visitors
Take your visitors step-by-step through the process of locating, subscribing and reading an RSS feed. By doing this, you are informing your website visitors and helping to promote the use of your own RSS feed.

To see a really good example of this, go to BBC News.

There is one last step to integrating RSS into your overall marketing strategy. This one is often overlooked, but can be extremely powerful when executed properly.

Take Your RSS Marketing to the Next Level with Your Affiliates
Provide your affiliates with an RSS feed of your product catalog. They can then use your feed to syndicate your latest product releases on their own websites. Whenever someone clicks on a headline, they would be directed to your web store. If they decide to make a purchase, the referring affiliate would make a commission on the sale.

Of course, this type of RSS would most likely need to be customizable, allowing the affiliate to carry only the products updates they feel would be a good match for their website.

Amazon.com has implemented this very same technique and it’s time that the rest of us do so as well.

RSS is one of many ways to communicate with your customer base. RSS should not be your only communication mechanism, but rather simply a piece of the marketing puzzle. When RSS is combined with other communication models, including email and postcard marketing, your message will finally receive its true potential. When any of these techniques are used alone, they lose much of their marketing power.

Start combining your communication models to see much higher response rates.

By Kim Roach

Humans vs. Search Engines
Human visitors and search engine robots that visit websites and index information about them look for different things in a page. People like to see an attractive layout with nice pictures and graphics, animation, easy-to-locate navigation, and friendly greetings like “Welcome to Annie’s Online Shop” at the top of a page. Search engines, on the other hand, like sites that have lots of textual content, good site structure (sitemaps, consistent linking style), and a meaningful phrase such as “Chicago Area Florist” as the heading of a page. While search engines can read the “alt image” tags of graphics, they cannot “look at” pictures the way a human visitor can, and far prefer text.

Replacing Text with Images
One way to work around this paradox is to shift some of the text that search engines have no interest in over to graphics. For example friendly greetings like “Welcome to Our Site” or “Annie’s Online Shop” work best as header graphics.

Creating a header graphic in a graphic editing program like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks has the advantage of letting you know exactly what that part of your site will look like to visitors. If you create a header or navigation bar with text, you are limited to a common set of fonts. If you use a fancy font that is installed on your computer, your page will look great to you, but when a visitor who does not have that font on their computer visits your site, their browser’s default font will be used and that nice aspect of your site will disappear. By making your header or navigation button images, you are free to use any of the fonts on your computer, and can be sure they will display the same way to your visitors.

Another advantage of using a header graphic is that you can remove words irrelevant to your target keywords from your textual content. When search engine robots visit a site, they read pages from left to right, top to bottom. The first 20-25 words and last 20-25 words of your text content are especially important, and you want to make sure to include your target keywords within these sections. If at all possible, your primary target keyword phrase should be the very first text in your page. That is, if you are able to make a natural-sounding sentence beginning with it. If your page begins with “Welcome to our site!”, then you are pushing your keyword further away from the starting point of your text.

The first line of the main text on your page should be in heading format, with H1 tags (In html code it will look like this:

London Hotels

), and should contain your target keyword. However, you may want to add a greeting above the heading (”Welcome to Our Site!” for example). Since this is a very general phrase, with no relevance to any target keyword, it is best to make this a graphic.

If your site already has a greeting such as “Welcome to Our Site” in text at the top of your main page, it is relatively easy to convert this to a graphic, as follows.

• Open your page in an internet browser.
• Push the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard.
• Open a photo editing program, such as Photoshop.
• Create a new document and select Edit>Paste or Ctrl+V on your keyboard. The screenshot will be pasted on the blank document.
• Crop the image down to just the word or phrase you would like to replace, with only a little blank space around the edges.
• Choose “Save as” or “Save for Web”, saving the file in the “Images” folder of your site.
• In your site editor, such as Dreamweaver, simply open your page, delete that text, and drag and drop in the image you created. Save and upload your page. 

Replacing Images with Text
Of course, the opposite might also be true of your current site. Your keywords might be displayed as graphics rather than text. In this case, you should either repeat those keywords in text in a way that looks natural, or get rid of the graphics altogether and replace them with text. The important thing is that your target keyword appears as text, as close to the beginning of the page as possible, and within H1 tags.

Alt Image Tags
“Alt image” tags are short pieces of text that are associated with a graphic. If the graphic cannot be displayed for some reason, or if someone has set up their browser to block images, the text is shown instead. (The “alt” is short for “alternative”.) Also, browsers designed for the sight impaired read out the text content of pages, and read the alt image tags as a way of describing a page.

Here is what an image tag looks like in html code:

http://www.YourDomain.com/images/logo.gif” alt=”Your
Keyword image” width=”728″ height=”123″>

The alt image tag is this part:

alt=”Your Keyword image”

You can type the alt image tags directly into the html code. However, most html editors, such as Dreamweaver, give you an easier way to add an alt tag, and you should check in your software’s “Help” section.

Search engine robots do read and index alt image tags. However, since this text is normally hidden from human visitors, it is especially susceptible to keyword spamming (i.e. entering a massive string of keywords that “hide” behind the picture). For this reason, search engines are giving less importance to alt image tags. They still are important though, and having the tags on your pages can give you a slight edge over competitor sites that don’t have the tags. When adding alt image tags to your pages, keep the following points in mind:

• Don’t go overboard. 4 or 5 words are plenty. Resist the temptation to pack in a long list of keywords because this could potentially get your site penalized by search engines or blacklisted from their directories.
• The alt image tag should include the primary target keyword of your site.
• The tag text should make sense if someone actually read it, and actually describe what is shown in the graphic.
• Include “image,” “photo,” or “graphic” at the end of your short phrase. This prevents the search engines from flagging the tag as spam.

Using these techniques to organize the graphics on your site will give you a slight edge over the competition in the search engines.

By John Case