It has been said, computers are expensive paper weights, dumber than a box of rocks, as worthless as teats on a bull.

All this changes when you have some decent software running on them, because now they become capable of, decision making, sometimes called “thinking machines” (you have to have some really good software for this), gateways to a wealth of information. Your website or web page is software, simple software, but software none the less.

Let’s take a look at search engine spiders. They are housed in expensive paper weights and come to life because of the software which makes them “a spider”. Now they become less of a paper weight, but the box of rocks thing… well…  like the dog running around the house looking for bacon treats, yelling bacon, I smell bacon, gets to the bag of treats and yells out “I Can’t Read”.  Well spiders can’t read either. They are good collectors of bits and bytes which get stored in a database somewhere for further analysis. How this process happens is based on the design implemented by the creators of the spider software, and that process is beyond the scope of this article.

For the sake of this story, let us assume the spider is a gatherer and indexer.

The Gathering Phase.

The spider comes to your site and hits your landing page, then starts collecting the bits and bytes, stuffing the sequence of information into a database. At this point, they are shoveling information into a database, not reading anything, even your images and fine graphics are just a bunch of hexadecimal notations which are more bits and bytes. Scoop, scoop, scoop they go as they start at the top of your page and finish up with the closing HTML tag. Then it’s time to move on.

The Indexing Phase.

Once the spider (remember this one is both a gatherer and indexer) gets around to indexing the content it scooped up while gathering, it takes off the hunting attire and put on the lab coat.

In this case the lab coat is another software program which turns it into a “thinking machine” (maybe a C student) but… well I digress… This allows for the task of checking for the proper sequencing of the bits and bytes it collected.

We as humans see the opening HTML tag, the HEAD tag, the TITLE tag, the META tags and so on. The spider/indexer now starts to translate the bits and bytes to a known series which enables it to determine what it has. One series represents the opening HTML tag, another the HEAD tag, and so it goes.

Based on the algorithm, it is known a particular sequence only appears once on between the beginning and the end of a page, while others have different attributes which includes your content. Think about that falling gibberish on the computer screens in the Matrix. The sequences are matched to known sequences and evaluated. Once the evaluation process is finished, there is a reference to your web page and everything else it (the spider/indexer) has been told to determine as important or not.

If you have 2 TITLE tags on your page, the indexer may evaluate one and discard the other. Which one is anybody’s guess, with the exception of the software creator. Also you may get dinged because you have 2 TITLE tags, so instead of getting an A now it is less as it may be perceived to interfere with the user experience, or a lot of other stuff might be faulty.

Missing other tags? Depending on the algorithm, you may also be dinged for that as well.  If it sees an over abundance of the same sequence of bits and bytes, may just mean your keyword stuffing, and you can just hear it… “Ding!”

Getting too many of these dings, ultimately rates your bits and bytes as less relevant and you drop in the listings with a “Thud”. So rather than soaring with eagles, your hangin ’round with the turkeys.

How Does the Spider Know My Keywords?

This is where the structure really matters. The spider has no idea what keywords you are targeting, and doesn’t care, so you need to tell it what is important. This is where a well structured web page comes in.

You should know it is important to put your keywords in the TITLE tag of your web page, the reason for this is to guide the spider into making the decision to keep that series of bits and bytes as a reference to the remaining information between the beginning and the end of your page.

Having an H1 tag at the top of your content containing the same series of bits and bytes contained in the TITLE tag, reminds the spider/indexer that this stuff is till important.

Good content does follow the rules of a well written paper. Identify your topic, open with the information outlining what is to follow, and then supporting information.

There is a bit more information in Organic Website Marketing Strategy.

One school of thought implies your keywords should also appear in the beginning of the document (web page). You should also apply the bold or strong tags around the series of bits and bytes that appeared in the TITLE and H1 tags. This just puts another check into the important column so the spider/indexer knows to keep  that bit/byte series as important.

If you have ever run a keyword extractor program against your web page and found none of your keywords show up well or at all, is because there is no rhyme or reason to the text you have on the page indicating your chosen phrase is important.

Just think of being at the mall with your very young son or daughter and saying, not over there, come here, we’re going this way, come on. Just think of a spider/indexer as a little kid that found a sparkling thing in the wrong window and you have to tell it, not over there, come here, we’re going this way now. Simplified? Yes. You should get the idea though.

So to wrap this up, structure is very important because the spider/indexer needs to be told your intentions, otherwise it will surely find that sparkling thing in the wrong window and your rankings will suffer.

Now put that leash on the spider and get good rankings.