The Widget Queen
You are the Widget Queen. You eat,
breathe, and live widgets. You sell more
widgets than anyone. You want to reach more widget customers, so you have
decided to sell widgets on the web. You have spared no expense in designing and
building the ultimate widget website. You have widget descriptions; you have
widget specifications; you even have widget movies. The only thing your widget
website does not have is visitors.
Off to the search engines you go. You type in the phrase “left-handed blue
widgets” and look at the results. All of your major competitors are listed.
There are even competitors you have never heard of. But you, the Widget Queen,
do not have a listing there. https://deniaviva.com
What’s up with that? What follows is some very basic introductory material
followed by some advanced technical details on dynamic sites and SEO.
What is a search engine?
First of all, you need to understand what a search engine actually searches.
When a potential visitor does a search in a search engine, such as Google or
AllTheWeb/FAST, she is not really searching the web; rather, she is looking at a
database compiled by that search engine. This database consists of the text and
links from the web pages that have been visited by the search engine’s robot.
How is a search engine database compiled?
Search engines compile these databases automatically using software programs
called “robots” or “spiders”. These automatic programs visit pages on the World
Wide Web, much as humans visit web pages using browsers, by starting at some
arbitrary location and following links. When a website owner “submits” a page to
a search engine, in most cases she is supplying the search engine’s robot with a
starting point for their automatic journey. Starting in that location, the robot
then follows links and thus “discovers” other pages in your website or visits
other sites to which your site is linked. (This, by the way, is how search
engines can find individual pages or whole sites that have never been submitted
to them–if there is a link to one site from another site, chances are good that
eventually a search engine robot is going to find that link and follow it.)