WELCOME to Core, a newsletter with news, nuggets and information on best practices in business-to-business marketing. With it, we hope to share information vital to any organization looking to generate results and accelerate growth through intelligent strategy, branding, marketing and public relations. In this edition: Attracting robots to your website.

Robots, also known as spiders, are the software tools that search engines use to comb through and categorize websites. Making your site attractive to robots is essential in achieving high listings in search engine results pages… so attracting the robot visitor is key to bringing in the visitors you really care about: customers.

In the battle between those who maintain the search engines, and want them to rank sites objectively – and those who maintain the websites, and want them to give their sites higher rankings – the exact workings of the robots are a closely guarded secret. But some key features of robot behavior can be divined, and from these, some simple rules arise for making sites robot-friendly.

1 - Words, words, words
The simplest rule to remember: robots will only read the text on your web page. They can’t read graphics, they can’t read Flash movies, and they can’t read your really cool sound and video files. So make sure the essence of your message is in the text. Where you must use graphics – to appeal to the human visitor – label them with <alt> tags so the robots (and visually impaired human visitors) at least know what the graphic is about. But bear in mind <alt> tags carry less “weight” than plain old text.

For the same reason, using graphics for headings is less desirable than using text. Try using CSS styling to modify the standard HTML heading tags to achieve the look you want.

2 - Tag ’em!
Most of us have heard of metatags. These are strings of text in a web page that are not visible to the human visitor; originally, robots used metatags to determine what a page were about. Unscrupulous site owners, in an effort to attract robots, have taken to stuffing the metatags with words that don’t accurately reflect the page’s true content. (A common trick is to put competitors’ names in the metatags in that hope that when someone searches for the competitor, your site will come up in the listings.)

These days, robots are much more sophisticated and can read the page content itself. They look at metatags as just one of many factors they use to determine how relevant the page is to a particular search term. So use metatags, but use them honestly and judiciously.

3 - Robots respond to repetition
If the  word “healthcare” appears frequently in your web page, the robots will naturally assume the page is about healthcare. Use this to your advantage by ensuring the key words most important to your market are liberally sprinkled throughout your copy.

Moderation in all things, of course – robots are programmed to ignore what appears to be repetition for its own sake – and human visitors will be turned off by it. So look for creative ways to repeat the key words: instead of “Our solutions help you save money,” try “Our mobile healthcare workstations help you improve productivity,” which has the added benefit of being more message-specific.

4 - Robots love links
If there’s one thing robots love more than repeated key words, it’s links. Links coming into your site from others are most highly prized, because they indicate to the search engine that a third party puts value on what your site has to say – and that increases your page-ranking. Encourage your business partners and customers to link to your site, and return the favor to them. Links with long meaningful names, including your key words if possible, are the best of all. Of course, that needs to be belanced with what looks and reads well for the human visitors!

5 - Stay on message
The copy on your home page likely expresses your message pretty well. But on other pages, it’s easy to get bogged down in wordier copy that covers more ground. Keep copy focused and make sure the key words from your message are repeated.

And remember, in almost any market, using single a key word alone will not be sufficient to propel you to the top of the search rankings. It’s a lot harder to “own” the word “networking” than the term “hospital wireless networking”. Besides, if hospital wireless networking is what you specialize in, there’s little point in encouraging people with other networking needs to visit your site – you’re wasting their time and your own. So get specific, and think up multiple-word key phrases that are unique to you.

Where to from here?
There’s plenty more we could write about attracting robots. In fact, with webmasters and robots continually one-upping each other in a Darwinian struggle for higher search engine rankings, every day brings new tactics and counter-tactics. But for now, we hope we have set you thinking about ways to lure robots to your website. And, of course, feel free to share your thoughts with us – we are here to help. We created Core with the goal of enhancing your marketing practices. We hope you enjoyed this edition.

Sincerely,

Arketi Group
core@arketi.com  

PS. Please visit our website to learn more: www.arketi.com.