My morning routine is exactly that – a routine. I have it [almost] down to a science since our precious baby entered the picture. A glimpse: alarm strikes at 5am – I’m up! Get my daughter’s milk and feed her. Done. Clean bottles, if needed, gather her bag for the day, get lunches together, get my gear and put it car. Done. Get myself ready for the day. Done. Get peanut ready for her day. Done. And we’re officially off – around 6:40am. I take the same route every day, rarely switch lanes, and there has been one thing I noticed. Several other drivers are on the same driving schedule. In other words, I see the same cars at the same time at the same spot every morning. Hello, yellow jeep with family stickers on the back. There’s the black truck. Hey cop that’s ending his night shift. And, funny enough, this actually started me thinking about search engines and spider crawls.
So, quick rewind of the morning. I get up and accomplish every task that needs to get done and then get in the car and go. No thought behind it. I’m on auto-pilot. Set on default. Just go. And by the time I get to her daycare, 75% of the time I think to myself, “Oh, we’re here already.” The other 25%, during the trip or at some point in the morning, a curve ball was thrown. For example, this morning, the yellow jeep I previously referenced was driving in the opposite lane for quite some time. Being that they are part of my normal routine, I was wondering why this was so as they need to be in my lane. So I held off and waited. Sure enough, he made it over…which brings me back to my original reason to writing this post – search engines and spider crawls.
When a search engine crawls your site, it’s sort of running on auto-pilot, just like my daily morning routine. And especially if your site has been crawled hundreds of times before, the search engine might know what to expect, just plugging away, indexing it’s heart out…until it happens. New content. It’s the yellow jeep in the opposite lane. Something new that diverts your attention away from the task at hand. It’s a good thing. It startles and brings greater awareness what you are actually doing. Wakes you up and shakes you.
This morning routine brought greater understanding and importance on why sites need to continuously create new content and revisit old content. These updates will jolt those spiders, signal the search engines this site was recently updated, crawl it for relevant content, as it should, look at associated keywords, as it should, and continue on its way. The spiders are doing its job, and, thanks to your efforts, made their job that much more enjoyable by giving them something new to experience during the crawl. And as a result, by continuing to entertain, in a sense, search engines will recognize this site as something that has its game together. It’s staying around, being dependable, getting new information out there, and as a result, continue to include in the search rankings for those coveted keywords.
It’s amazing how some online marketing processes can be made so relevant to daily activities. And just another reason how our ever-lovin’ search engines creep into my morning! Happy Thursday!!
