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Imagine programs that work 24/7, 365 days a year, with barely an off cycle in between. Imagine programs who's influence spans the globe. Imagine programs so incredibly important, yet they go largely unnoticed, and unrecorgnised.
No, its not some stealthy virus released into the wild by big brother, its the humble Search Engine Spider, the wandering rovers of the computer world
These nifty little programs are the workhorses of today's search engines, software programs specifically written to trawl through the internet, checking and recording snapshots of webpage's and reporting back to base with what they find. Search engine spiders take a number of factors into account when looking at your webpage and it's important you recognize each one.
Below is a listing and definition of what a spider wants to find on your page, and what to keep in mind for optimimum  SEO:
- URL - Keywords within a URL are of great benefit, you should ensure those keywords are reinforced throughout the page. Keywords should be used in both directories/folders and the individual files. Keyword phrases can be separated by a hyphen or underscore
- Title Tag - The title tag is the first user configurable tag considered relevant for spiders. The title should be relevant to the content and utilize up to 4 keywords.
- Meta Keyword Tag - Specific keywords for that page, separated by a comma, and inter-related. You should use these keywords as the basis for the keywords in your content. Repeating them in various other tags to the point of at least 2% density overall. Also don't repeat different versions of the same keyword phrase Example: socks: red, blue, green, is better than red socks, green socks, blue socks.
- Meta Description Tag - Many engines use the description text as a summary in search results. One again you should litter this text with the keywords you have decided upon for each page. Since this data is likely to be viewed on search engine results, it's important to make sure it legible for users.
- H1, H2 etc - Often underutilized in favor of image based headers, header tags are considered important identifiers by search engine spiders. Take advantage of that and use text based headers instead.
- Keyword Placement - Keywords and phrases that appear higher up on the page receive higher weight than those buried in the depths of the page. A common practice for keyword phrases is to use the phrase several times, early in the page content, before reverting to abbreviations or synonyms. This makes the content read naturally and avoids possible problems with spam.
- Bold Tag - text inside bold tags is given more weight for not only the reader, but the spiders as well, try to have your bold text appear as inter-related keywords and phrases.
- Alt - like headers, alt tags are often overlooked, and in order to conform to accessability standards, you should use alt tags for all your images. Make sure the tags are descriptive and once again reinforce your keywords.
- Anchor Text - Both inbound and outbound anchor text should reference keywords you wish to use on that page and throughout your site. Don't be afraid to liberally spread links in your copy which reference other areas of the site. MSN Search is particularly appreciative of this measure.
- Overall Code Quality - the leaner the code, the better. Focus on getting your code to conform to XHTML standards, and you will ensure that you get maximum search engine impact for your content. Keep the page size to a minimum.
Other factors to consider which don't relate directly to your code are overall traffic and link popularity. Link popularity is an overall measure of how many external sites link to that page, and the relevance of the source page to your content. Ideally, every page should have several inbound links, from quality sources, in your general category. So for Peak SEO I seek out links from other SEO sites, blogs, webmaster sites, domain sites etc.
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