“Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly” is a line from a nursery rhyme that we have all heard from the time we were knee high to a grasshopper.  And that was almost before anyone knew about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Those nursery rhymes and stories taught us to avoid trouble and “trouble” was often personified in the shape of a spider. (“Along came a spider and sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away.”) We all want to avoid those ugly creatures as often as possible but the search engine spiders are ones that we WANT to attract. They aren’t ugly. They get our websites INDEXED!

So, yes, we want to attract the search engine spiders to our websites. The question is how to do that. What does one use for spider bait?

Changing Content: Changing Content is terrific spider bait. Search engine spiders take note when content changes on a website and they are drawn to the site. So change your content and do it often.

META tags: The description tags that you put into your headers and graphics aren’t seen by your website visitors, but they are duly noted by the search engine spiders. Don’t overlook these tags. There are very good spider bait.

Site Popularity: The number of visitors to your website is noted by the search engine spiders. You want to do everything you possibly can to attract visitors to your website including writing and marketing articles and posting to blogs and forums.

Search engine spiders count visitors…not sales.

Keywords: Your use of keywords on your website is natural spider bait. Your main keyword needs to be in your heading once, in the first sentence of the first paragraph once and at least twice in the first paragraph.

Of course, there are some black hat SEO tactics, and we recommend that you don’t use those. They will attract the spiders and a lot of trouble as well.

Stick to white hat spider attracting tactics like those listed above and you won’t be killed by the Black Widow!