We’re not referring to the eight legged spiders hanging around outside your house, but rather we mean the spiders that search engines uses to find and catalogue content on the World Wide Web. Every search engine known to man uses these spiders to index web pages into a database and calculate page rankings based on algorithms. If you understand the basics of what spiders do, you will understand what their role is in ranking websites on the WWW.

All you will likely be interested in is the fact that your website did get ranked and how well it was ranked. To understand a bit of how these spiders work, you need to know that they are robots. 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? Spiders can’t read them. So if you want to optimize your site, you need to know how spiders see your world.

What, how on earth do I find out how a spider sees my site? Don’t panic, it’s very easy with a search engine spider simulator. To get around content that looks like its being missed use image descriptions by making use of something called the “alt” tag.

By the way you may also use the handy alt tag for links too. Go easy on using your keywords and make sure you aren’t guilty of stuffing them. The spider simulation software also tells you if your links are going to the right place.

Be wary about link exchanges, as they have been known to hand out fake links using script spiders can’t read. If you don’t see a link being shown by the simulator, you will know that isn’t right.

It isn’t true that you need a whole lot of link backs to your site in order to be able to rank well on the search engine listings. Don’t use too many links, as all it does is return either a forbidden error or a page not found error. Too many links with errors will mean a spider can’t view the website. The spider simulator only shows links that work, so if you don’t see a link, you know it’s broken.