We’ve been thinking more about botcred, the word we invented last week to describe the credibility you need to accumulate with search engine spiders, aka robots or bots.

The first response of human visitors when they encounter your website is a pre-conscious evaluation of the look and feel (i.e., “this looks like what I’m looking for”), and they’ll give you 4.5 seconds to make your brand narrative obvious and relevant.

It’s completely different with the search engine bots, who patiently begin reading code, testing the originality of your content, measuring the quality and quantity of inbound links, noting how many pages have changed since the last visit, when your url expires, and 200 other clues to your credibility.

In baseball terms, credibility with human visitors means a higher batting average: more frequent successes after they find you. But first you need botcred, to raise your visibility on search engine results: you’ll get found more often .. meaning more opportunities to bat.