Search engine and the custom web crawlers

There is an incredibly large data available on the internet which stays hidden from search engines, the reason being the way search engines use their web crawlers. How do we access all that wealth of data? And how to find it? The answer is to have a custom web bot or web crawler. In case you found a website you can use web scrapping tools for data extraction from the web site.

As many websites are comming up so quickly, it has become hard for the search engines to keep up with the world wide web. If the pages of a certain website are not updated it becomes redundant and obsolete and won’t appear in any search engines. Recently many changes have been made the way search engines operate on the web. The page ranking system which allows the websites with most hits to come on the top of search results forces the other websites which might have better information then the latter to be way far down in the ranking. Thus regular updates are must for a website to float around on the front page.

Here is where the web scrapping tools come into play, these are special programmes or web bots as they are known sometimes. These programmes are designed to methodically browse the world wide web as required by the user. There are different levels of web-scrapping automation for example Google uses its own web crawlers defined by specific algorithms to search the internet. You can use custom web crawlers that can do the laborious job of searching the whole of internet for specific data that you require without the need of available search engines.

These tools are resource intensive, sometimes it might take days or weeks or possibly year and might require a large storage space to collect all the data, neverthe less they are useful because they can get you to the place which are normally hidden and might not be visible on search engines. A Web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies.

You can use the web-crawlers to do many automated processess like checking links on the website or validating HTML code. You can also keep tabs on data that is related to your nich like surveys and data mining to get your website up-to-date. But there is an ugly side to every technology there is on the internet. Data can be duplicated without the knowlege of the owner. Also one can use the DHA (Directory Harvest Attack), simply speaking it copies the email addresses from a domain name for spamming purposes. This is usually performed by Web-bots or crawlers designed to do that automatically.

Getting on top of Search Engine

To get on the top of the search engine ranking(SERP) is what most of the people think is the only thing will improve their sales, but is that really true. Sure it does improve your website’s rating and your website traffic. The truth is that thinking of visitors and page views in turns of numbers might not be the ultimate way of improving the overall performance of your website. Even if you are a dot com owner, your business is governed by almost similar principals as a regular business.

SEO tools like link building and directory submission service are just tools, just by using them without doing a proper research will not improve anything. Just like an ordinary business, people look at your advertisement come to your website, but when they don’t find anything interesting they are not coming back. You’ll just end up becoming one of those spammy website and nothing more.

There are many examples of website that just buy links with desired anchor text, what do these websites do? Try searching Google on key word “sale” and you’ll end up on a webpage that has nothing to do with sale, but still that website ranks on the first page of Google search. If you are visitor, you’ll just bounce of the page in matter of seconds, and next time when you see the same website popping up in the search result, you are not going to visit it.

So you need to focus on relevance of your website and set correct keywords. If Google does not find relevant text on your webpage with reference to your keywords and meta tags, it will simply put your website on the bottom. So invest in conversion optimization rather than using sneaky codes to improve performance of your website and improve website traffic.

Social networking sites and blogs

You must have noticed that after getting your blog listed in Google, Yahoo or MSN search, it takes a hell lot of time to bring your website on the top of the search engine ranking although user reviews show that Google is the slowest in doing that. Getting noticed is one of the biggest challenge for any website unless you are ready to pay for getting listed.

The other thing is that listing your website and getting your search engine ranking high does not mean anything unless you really know that your target customers are actually interested in what you offer.

So lets look at other arenas where you can make your mark. One does need to find whether their content is actually interesting or not. The best way to do it is by implementing SMO and SMM. Well these acronyms mean Social Media Optimization and Social Media Marketing respectively. It is for making your content more appealing to sites like reddit and del.ico.us.

So the trick is to get busy and log yourself into the social networking sites and website sharing sites like digg, twitter, Facebook and Ecademy (for business people). These portals will allow you to be in touch with real people. You can test the strength of your articles or you can find out what people actually think about your products or your web related services. The most important thing is that you get to be in touch with people from everywhere and from every walk of life. Most of all you can have fun while you are at it.

This in turn can help you with your organic SEO, as you will be able to optimize your blog or your website accordingly. So don’t forget that at the end of the day you need to be on top of people’s search engine ranking.