Visited by A Bot

ByJulianC

Visited by A Bot

GooglebotIf you have a website, even a personal page on Facebook or Google+, you have certainly been visited by a Bot. “Bots,” short for robots, are also known as “crawlers” or “web spiders,” and they are simply software programs that do repetitive tasks over and over. Day and night, every day of the year, millions of bots crawl the internet looking for bits of information, and transmitting it back to their creators. Bot activity is so great that it accounts for about one half of all web traffic.

Many people think that all bots are malevolent invaders looking for passwords, personal data or private messages. Indeed, some are, but bots also perform functions that are essential to the internet. Without them, navigating the billions of webpages on the web would be a hopeless task. They are the explorers, sent to search out information critical to anyone who is trying to find your webpage (or a similar one).

The best-known creator of these web crawlers is Google. ‘Googlebots’ originate in one of numerous locations and thousands of computers all around the world; they use an algorithm (a secret algorithm) to determine what websites to examine, how often, what material to look for and how many pages to look at. Some large websites may contain thousands of pages. This kind of information allows Google, Bing and other indexers to classify and rank the site. That is what is important to the website owner; they want as much favorable attention from these bots and their ranking algorithms as possible.

As the bot examines each website or URL, it looks for information like page titles, location data, graphic image titles, refresh dates and links (or broken links – see our 3/26/18 Blog Article, “Broken Links, Lost Opportunities”). Googlebots, Bing bots and others are like bees, buzzing around the internet and bringing back nectar for the queen bee to process. That queen bee is the ranking algorithm that determines your page ranking.

To extend the buzzing bee analogy, the HTML code elements on a webpage are like flowers trying to attract the attention of friendly bots. They are saying. “Rank me, rank me, please rank me high.”  Search engine optimization (SEO) services, the workers in internet marketing agencies and the designers of SEO strategy all devote their talents and efforts to getting that attention. Branding strategies, local SEO services and even entire business plans are built around these efforts.

How active are these bots? If you have a website, even a static, unmaintained site it is likely that a bot from one of the major indexers will visit at least once a day just to see if anything has changed. Some types of websites, like breaking news or financial data pages will be visited literally every few seconds. They must do so in order to keep results from search terms like “Amazon price” current.

For the typical webpage owner, the world of HTML code, page titles, linking and back-linking are far removed from their core interests. Cheap web design without proper attention to SEO techniques will not get the ranking they want and deserve. A professionally designed SEO strategy implemented by a solid search engine optimization company, and combined with traditional marketing tools like direct mail advertising will achieve the results you need. If you are searching for a digital marketing solution that works and a branding strategy that gets your business to the top, turn to Axiom. Your business deserves more than a cheap web design.

Axiom Administrative Services has the professional small business SEO skills needed to attract the favorable attention of those buzzing bots. Please visit Axiom’s small business services page or call Axiom at 800-888-6348.

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