The SEO News Blog from Pat Marcello

Oh, you’ve seen the sites. “Just $49 and we’ll submit your site to a gazillion search engines! It’s great for SEO! It’s amazing! Give us your money!”

PFFFTTT!!!

This is just one of those bullshit services that newbies fall for.

Here’s the deal… DO NOT pay anyone for search engine listings. The robots will find you, even if you have no keywords in your title, even if you have a crappy description, even if you’ve only been online for a week. Robots will find your page and decide whether to rank it or whether to come back at all.

Want to see if the search bots have seen your page and when?

Just type your domain into the search engine and see what comes up. At Google, if you click in the “Cached” link under the description for your site, you can see your page and the date and time that Google last visited. If it was the current day or yesterday, cool! You’re updating often. If it was a month ago, you have problems, brothers and sisters. You need to add some fresh stuff to your site or you’ll never rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages) at all.

Bing also has a “Cached Page” link that you can check out, but they’re still slower than Google. Google had my page from yesterday, while Bing hadn’t been there since 11/5. You know how often I post, so…

Yahoo also has a “Cached” link, but it wasn’t working, so… I can’t comment on its frequency by using this technique.

But there is a foolproof way: You can also go into your hosting account’s c-Panel dashboard to check this out. Most have a feature called “AWStats,” which tells you quite a lot of information, including which search bots visited and how many times they came during the month and even how many times they successfully accessed your “robots.txt” file. continue reading »

You may have been distraught to notice that I haven’t been as regular with posting for the past couple of weeks as I normally am. Or… You didn’t notice a hoot. Whichever is perfectly OK.

But…

The reason that I haven’t been as consistent as usual is because I’ve been working on a new product! It’s called “Spider Language,” and Tellman Knudson is my partner, mentor, boss, and really good friend.  We actually got the product into ClickBank last week, and already we’re making sales.  I’m thrilled!

Spider Language is for folks who want to begin to learn SEO, and for some folks maybe not so new to SEO, but want to learn more. We’ll talk about everything from how search engine spiders work to site construction to linking and the whole shebang… What I call the SEO “Matrix,” which inclues blogging, article marketing, press releases, video, and more.

The course will be presented weekly in Jimmy D. Brown “Membernaire” style, which is a totally awesome model, by the way. It will include a weekly .pdf, at least one video, and a homework assignment that you’ll need to complete to move on to the next lesson. (Just so you’re getting it.) Usually, it won’t take more than an hour to complete the whole deal, so you don’t have to worry about not having the time. We’re dishing it out in small bites to make it easy to learn.

Anyone who is already SEO savvy is welcome to promote this. It’s a great money maker and steady income for you. Just search “Spider Language” in the Marketplace, under the category Business to Business.

This is gonna rock!

Want to check it out? Go to http://SpiderLanguage.com We are going to rock your SEO world and your traffic!

So, I’m working on a top secret project that I’m very excited about. As part of it, I took on the onus of defining what a search engine spider does.

People who aren’t into SEO probably don’t really know. They probably have a general idea, but it may not be what you think.

Spiders don’t decide where your page will rank in Google, the algorithm does that.

Spiders don’t need to be alerted, they’ll just show up.

Spiders aren’t always good spiders.

Spiders do crawl the web. They go into every nook and cranny where they’re allowed and they gather pages. They take the data on those pages and condense it, then send it back to the search engine so that the algorithm can be applied. That’s what determines where your page will show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

You don’t need to do anything special for them to show up. Submitting your website to all the search engines is a waste of time, and paying a service to do that for you is a waste of money. Spiders will come.

How well you prepare your pages by having the right META tags and keywords on your page, and perhaps a robots.txt, to tell them which pages to notice and which to ignore, will help you when it comes time for the algorithm to be applied.

But that’s if the spider is sending your page to a search engine. Some spiders are black widows. Some of them go around gathering pages that have email addresses so that creepy spammers can harvest those addresses and spam you with abandon.

Yet, most of the spiders that frequent your page are the good kind, and without them, there would be no search engines.

The nicest thing you can do for a spider, kind of like leaving cookies out for Santa, is to give them the information they need to send to the search engine. It’s the nicest thing for you, too, because unlike Santa, they are real, and they mean the difference between you showing up in the search indexes or being an orphan.

If you do nothing else, learn what META tags are and include a title and description for every page. Remember, too, that each page is different and requires a different title and description. And don’t be lazy!

Remember, search engine traffic is free. The better you prepare your pages for the spiders, the better your website will do.

OK… here’s another great question from the SEOmoz.org SEO test:

“What’s the best way to maximize the frequency with which your site/page is crawled by the search engines?”

No brainer, right?

Or, is it?

Your choices included two that might be correct, but there is only ONE right answer.

All good SEOs know that the BEST #1 Way to get the spiders to come more often is by adding new content frequently. What does “frequently” mean? Well… it can mean every day.

I’ve written here before that the best thing to do with a blog is to write in it every single day, which is tough. But you have to remember that not every post has to be written. You can post audio, video, articles, reviews, pictures, and whatever is relevent to your niche, and it doesn’t always have to be yours.  Relevence is very, very important, and using other people’s material from the public domain, YouTube, or even article directories is OK, if you do it the right way.

One of the other answers to the test was to turn up the crawl frequency in Google Webmaster tools. Well… it seems right, huh? But when you think about it, that will only help you to get the spiders to your site quicker, if they feel like abiding by your wishes. I guarantee that if you don’t provide fresh spider food often, they won’t.

Content.

Content.

More content.

It’s always about the content online, so if you’re in business, that’s what you need to remember. It’s all about what you create (or have others create for you) that really matters. Get your stuff out there, get noticed by the spiders, and keep doing more of it.

Search engines love NOTHING more than fresh content for their searchers.

And your business needs all the traffic those little buggers can provide.