Names AT Names - Domain Name Information Site

There are a few simple tips which all webmasters need to implement in order to get their website properly crawled and indexed by the search engines. Through the use of software robots, search engines are crawling websites by following links they discover on various websites.

Letting Search Engines Know About Your Site

The best way for Search Engines to discover your site is to get links from other sites. The ideal would be to have links from relevant to your site's content websites. Thus, for example, a clothing retail website might have links from manufacturer websites, or consumer websites. It is not necessary to get links from websites in direct competition to your products and services. It is rather better to opt for websites which supplement your content.

Help Search Engines to Crawl Your Website

It is the responsibility of the webmaster to disallow access to pages on their site, by instructing search engine robots (crawlers) which URLs should and which should not be indexed. Quantity is not important here as much as quality is.

Webmasters need also to ensure that the architecture of their website is what is called "search engine friendly" or "crawler friendly". Links which are coded using Javascript or included in a SWF movie are very difficult or impossible to be read by search engines.

The use of clean HTML href links is the optimal solution, to avoid running into problems.