SEO, Spiders and Sitemaps

It has been a couple of week, and I have been working on my website, WiseTome.com. During this time, I learned quite a bit on SEO - or Search Engine Optimization. I also learned about Spiders, not the ones that crawls the wall, but one that crawls the World Wide Web, and few things about SiteMaps.

SEO is a set of methods that has a purpose of improving the ranks of the websites and its pages in search engine listings. Spiders or Web Spiders or Web Crawlers is a program or an automated script that browses all the pages on the World Wide Web in an automatic manner and takes note of the content of these sites. SiteMaps are documents or pages that aid the spiders in crawling all the pages in a website.

As I had mentioned earlier, I had WiseTome.com set up using the Drupal CMS. I used a module to create the sitemaps automatically as the content is added to the site. This sitemap was then submitted to the Google Sitemaps so that the Googlebot - Google's spider - would find it easier to crawl all the pages of my site. I also activated and installed two more modules of Drupal, so that WiseTome had a cleaner URL coming on the address bar as visitors visited various articles present there. This is one of the methods that are used by SEO consultants on their clients’ pages.

There are many other methods that a SEO specialist may follow, but I think the rest of the job should be done by the visitors themselves. If the site is worth it, it would obviously get new visitors by word of mouth, and if the articles are worthy, they would get linked and tagged by other people.