A ‘Spider, Web Crawler or Bot’ is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “spider”, “crawler” or a “bot.” Spiders are typically programmed to visit sites that have been submitted by their owners as new or updated. Entire sites or specific pages can be selectively visited and indexed. Spiders are called spiders because they usually visit many sites in parallel at the same time, their “legs” spanning a large area of the “web.” Spiders can crawl through a site’s pages in several ways. One way is to follow all the hypertext links in each page until all the pages have been read. Read More

A meta tag is a line of HTML coding that contains metadata or information about a webpage. Meta tag information doesn’t change how the page looks; it won’t be seen by the website viewer, unless they are viewing your source code. There are two common types of meta tags — meta description tags and meta keywords tags. Read More

There are two kinds of search engine listings. Natural and Sponsored or Paid Listings. Paid listings are usually labelled in a separate section such as “sponsored listings”, at the top or right column of the page and Natural listings are the listings that are not paid for. They are determined by the search engines’ algorithms for finding, sorting and ranking pages based on relevancy. Read More

Some businesses are receiving very useful information from their social media campaigns, but other businesses are not. One reason for the lack of success could be that many businesses do not have a solid social media plan. Unfortunately, some businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon simply because it is the latest fad. Read More

Pay per click marketing (also known as search engine marketing) appears at the top and right side of a search engine results page. Search engine marketing services work by associating your ad with a keyword or phrase related to your product or service. Any time that keyword is used in a search, your PPC advertisement will be shown on the search results page. You only pay for PPC advertising when a customer actually clicks the link to visit your website. The cost charged for each click depends on popularity of the keyword, the search engine’s assessment of how descriptive the PPC ad and keyword are to your website, and how frequently your ad is clicked vs. your competitors’ ads. While PPC advertising shows up most often in search engine results, pay per click results may also appear on different advertising networks and various websites across the Internet. Read More