The method by which a search engine scans web content is through a computer program that sends out a software agent called a ‘bot,’ ‘search engine spider,’ or ‘web crawler’ designed to travel or ‘crawl’ from web page to web page by following a list of URLs (domain addresses) that point to links that point to web content.
Search engine optimization involves making sure a search bot can successfully crawl web content and scan it. There are many things that can impede the search bot’s ability to crawl the web successfully. For example, a poor linking or navigation structure within a website can cause the search bot to go round and round in circles, as if caught in a web, without ever being able to access and scan any of the actual web page content.
The same thing can happen with dynamically-generated web pages. Different from hard-coded HTML pages, dynamically-generated web pages are built on demand according to a programming script that accesses specified information from a database to gather the content it needs to make the web page. If the url-strings are not understandable by the search engine bot, for example, it will not know to access the pages to scan the content. In this case, search engine optimization will ensure that dynamically-generated web pages produce url-strings that can be followed by the search bot.
Among many other things, search engine optimization ensures the website’s linking structure and architecture are search engine ready, and work to seamlessly guide the search bot from page to page.
