When it comes to Search Engine Optimization or SEO, specifically the organic variety, it is all about the spiders. Spiders are the ones who decide, yes almost human-like, if they will “crawl” into your website and how high you will post on the search engines like google, yahoo, etc.

In fact, we just learned this week during a seminar on SEO that those same spiders can reject your site if you are trying to cheat the system (for example some bad key word etiquette is to hide keywords in white type on a white background or to jam your meta tags with keywords or to create what’s called a link farm). In fact, the spiders will go as far as blacklisting some sites that go too far. It is still so unbelievable that a computer generated “creature” can have the power to blacklist a website.

Even more unbelievable is the fact that a lot of companies are unaware of these spiders and the many SEO tools that are available out there. During this seminar, we were given homework that we think would be good homework for anyone wanting to explore the SEO world. Set up an account at Google AdWords just starting with basic keywords and go from there. Thank you to Dan Green and Silvana Gravini for that information.

There are plenty of other resources out there too. Our sister company Lenox Softworks (check out their fancy new website!) is also a great resource to learn more about the difference between SEO and Search Engine Marketing or SEM.

Happy searching — just don’t get caught by one of those ugly spiders!