So you have a new website, and it's time to promote it. You keep on hearing the words dofollow, nofollow, backlinks, spiders, crawlers … What exactly do they mean?
In order for search engines to find your page, you either need to submit them or have your link on other people's sites (called backlinks). Even if you submit your site to engines, it can take quite a while for your page to start showing up in the index. A quick way to get your page indexed and more popular with the search engines are backlinks.
Example: I just started http://www.my-site.com
My friend owns http://www.his-site.com
A backlink would be a link FROM your friends site TO your site. Or vica versa.
Once you have this, every time the search engine "crawler" or "spider" comes to your friends site it sees the link to your site and also goes there. This increases the number of times a crawler visits your site.
Google Page Rank can also be important to your website. Page Rank is basically self explanatory – the rank of your page. Most new pages start at Page Rank (or PR for short) 0. Page Ranks go from 0 (least popular) to 10 (most popular). Sites like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc have very high page rankings. New sites with little or no traffic have PR0. Page rank and backlinks coincide together. If you have a backlink on another PR0 site, the crawler does not visit that site very often so it will not get many more visits. However, if you have a backlink on a PR4 or PR5 site you will get many more visits. I've heard one backlink on a PR5 site equals 600 backlinks on a PR1 site.
So what is this dofollow vs nofollow stuff we always read about? This is basically telling the search engine crawler to follow the link or not.
If you just create a normal link on your site to another, its dofollow by default. You would have had to add the "nofollow" tag on the link if you did not want that link to be followed and indexed.
These are just the basic terms for someone new to SEO. With some hard work and dedication you may have the next big website!