When we’re talking about spiders and the Internet, we mean the spiders that search engines use to crawl the Net for content. There are certain formulas used in order for the spiders to accurately rank the information they find on their journeys across the Internet. While it’s nice to have a general idea of what spiders do, it isn’t necessary to know much more than that, unless you are a computer programmer.

What you really want to know is the ranking part and what it might mean for your website. Spiders aren’t that complicated to understand, as they are merely intelligent robots that gather information. That means they are only able to read certain types of content.

Now here is the bad news. Javascript, image text, frames and Flash have the potential to really cause search engine optimization disasters because – well, guess what? The robot spider is unable to read websites with fancy coding. In order to understand how to tweak your site, you have to see how a spider sees it.

What would I need to do in order to view what the spider sees on a website? Finding out is very easy by locating software that simulates what a spider sees. To get around content that looks like its being missed use image descriptions by making use of something called the „alt“ tag.

Yes, you can use „alt“ tags for links and Flash descriptions as well. Go easy on using your keywords and make sure you aren’t guilty of stuffing them. Don’t worry about links, as the spider software will tell you if they are in the proper locations.

Just a word of about link exchange websites. Some of them put in fake links to your site by using Javascript. If a link isn’t in the right place, the simulator won’t show the link so you know it’s not functional.

Just a thought about having links as well, since one school of thought insists you need to have tons of links to be on the top of the heap. If you over do it on the links you will get errors returned and not be able to access anything. Too many links with errors will mean a spider can’t view the website. Remember that spiders only will show a link that is pointed in the right direction, so if a link doesn’t show then it is not working.