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A spider is a piece of software that follows links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine databases. Spiders follow links from one page to another and from one site to another. This is why links to your site are crucial. Getting links to your website from other websites will give the search engine spiders more opportunities to find and re-index your site. The more times they find links to your site, the more they stop by and index your website. This has been true since the first spiders launched over two decades ago. Recently there has been an incredible amount of attention paid to links. Google confessed, the number and quality of links to your website will directly impact rankings in search results.

Hidden text is text content which your visitors cannot see, but which is still readable by the search engines. The original idea was to load a web page with keywords and keyphrases which would under normal circumstances be unsightly to visitors but would improve the page's rankings in the search engine results. You would then need to hide the text by either matching the text colour with the background colour, or loading hidden fields, or a number of other ways. However, hidden text is now easily identified as search spam by each of the major search engines, and is frowned upon by reputable web marketing professionals.

Nearly every company has a website these days. Having supplemental profile pages on social media and social networking sites will boost your website's ratings with search engines, making it easier to find than it would have been otherwise. Name brand recognition is another major reason why companies should consider adopting social media. People who like and/or follow the company on a social media site will in turn recommend the company and its products or services to their friends. A business has to connect with its customers in order to keep them coming back. Social media is one of the best ways to connect with first time customers. Social media's ability to engage clients in a relaxed, friendly way is one of its greatest strengths.

When is Facebook most effective? When are you better off using Twitter, or LinkedIn? And what exactly is Google+ good for, anyway? Want to make the most of the social web? It's more complicated than just posting status updates at random and seeing what sticks. Each business and industry is different, which means the audience and potential client base may be better suited for one platform over another. Recognizing the right social media or social networking site or sites to use is important. There really is no template answer to this question without knowing a little more about your business

A sitemap is a page within your website, which contains links to every other page within your website. It is a navigational page which is useful for visitors as well as search engine spiders. When creating your sitemap, link to each page of your website using your keywords in the link text. Include a text description of each page with the link. To make your sitemap easily accessible, link to it from every page of your website.

It's important to keep in mind, long-term success with high search engine ranking results do not happen overnight. After optimizing your website for search engines and completing your search engine submission, you should begin to see your website appear in results related to the keywords and keyphrases as designated in your campaign. However, it can take 1-2 months for optimization efforts to begin to pay off due to the time it takes for search engine spiders to properly index your site as well as as all the fresh periodic links to your website which will begin cropping up in other websites, blogs and directories. Ranking high in the search engine results pages consistently does take time and effort, but is well worth it in the long run.

It's a good idea to keep track of your web traffic, and there is software, which can measure how many visitors come to your site, where they come from, how long they stay, where they travel to within your site etc. It's called web analytics software, a popular search engine option being Google Analytics, and open source analytics solutions such as Piwik. They're integrated to help keep track of important web marketing metrics. Once integrated, detailed marketing information can be gleaned and used to help the application or website evolve.

Yes, you certainly can. And, in some instances, you have to. For example, when a visitor has signed into their account. When it comes to gathering website statistics and analytics, we prefer using Piwik, an open source web analytics application based on PHP and MySQL. It can record where visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, which search engines are being used to find you, which phrases are being typed into which search engines and many more interesting web traffic metrics useful for existing and future marketing campaigns.

No, search engines cannot index pages which are password protected. For that reason, password protecting certain pages is the best way to prevent them from being indexed by the search engines. There are other ways, but few are as effective as password protecting files you don't want random visitors to see.

Yes. Various forms of web marketing should be tackled regularly. Take some time every so often and submit your website to few directories or see if you can guest post on another popular blog to make a name for yourself. Dedicate some time every week to write and contribute fresh, new content. Bring your camera with you on your weekend drive or, better yet, bike ride. Get social and tell a story. Anyone worth their salt in marketing knows it's always an ongoing process - web or otherwise.