Knowing where Spiders like to feast can help Etailers improve SEO efforts

[mandy]

As every e-retailer knows, selecting the right keywords is the foundation for a successful search engine marketing strategy, whether paid search or natural. However, even the most carefully chosen words are of little value if they’re buried deep within an e-retailer’s site—where the spiders cannot capture them. This is why more online merchants are investing extra time in SEM efforts to cook up plenty of spider food and serve it just right.

While spiders horrify many people, on the Internet they replace dogs as an e-retailer’s best friend. Online spiders are applications used by search engines to crawl the web and send the engines web pages relevant to a search. But spiders, sometimes called webcrawlers, are very hungry and work very fast. So if they do not quickly identify highly relevant keywords on a web site, they move on to other sites.

To ensure the myriad spiders at work on the Internet—every search engine uses a variety—find keywords highly relevant to its products, online jeweler Ice.com last year launched three blogs that contain numerous links to its e-commerce site. When more web users link to a site it gains a higher profile among search engines. Also on each blog the e-retailer carefully inserts plenty of keyword references in blog entries as well as in the navigation bar...

full article: http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=20375

[BellisimaJ.]

Good article, Mandy--thanks!

While spiders horrify many people, on the Internet they replace dogs as an e-retailer’s best friend.

 

To ensure the myriad spiders at work on the Internet—every search engine uses a variety—find keywords highly relevant to its products, online jeweler Ice.com last year launched three blogs that contain numerous links to its e-commerce site. When more web users link to a site it gains a higher profile among search engines. Also on each blog the e-retailer carefully inserts plenty of keyword references in blog entries as well as in the navigation bar.

The big increase in keyword references on the home pages of the blogs combined with an increase in traffic from the blogs to the e-commerce site led to natural search traffic increases between 15% and 30%. And shoppers brought in through natural search purchased $50,000 worth of items during the 2005 holiday shopping season, a 35% increase over the same period in 2004, says executive vice president of marketing Pinny Gniwisch.

Okay, Cranky, I was wrong (so unusual   ). Blogs R US. Get to work, girl!! :blinkie:


Edited to fix the quote mess.

[cranky_hippie]

Tool King took another step to make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl its site. It removed excessive characters, such as ampersands and percentage marks, from the content because spiders won’t crawl pages with special characters, Cohen says.

Is this true? Spiders don't crawl pages with ampersands? 

[xppman]

I don't think so.
Many of my pages have had those on them for years and
I still place high in the search engines.
It's my belief that theses spiders / search engine companies
are NOT going to divulge all the criteria they use to craw/scrub the web.

Think about it.
If they TELL everyone just what to do than people would NOT
buy thier ad spots and BID on key words for placement,
because there would be no NEED to do so if you can place high with out PAYING for it. 

[BellisimaJ.]

Cranky, see links:

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=am...ne+spiders&gwp=13

http://www.google.com/search?q=ampersand...ne+spiders&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

#
Search Engine Terms: The Search Engine Dictionary
A comprehensive guide to search engine terminology - from Pandecta Magazine. ... equal signs and ampersands) that signal the search engine spiders to stop ...
www.searchenginedictionary.com/s.shtml - 74k - Cached - More from this site

[cranky_hippie]

It looks like the spiders just don't like characters in the URL. Good.  ;D