Alaska’s Best SEO

Have you ever wondered how search engine friendly your site is? I think that most people consider it, but assume that the spiders look at sites like we do…which is very incorrect.

Search Engine Spiders (or Web Crawlers) literally “read” your website. They do not see pictures, flash, etc.

If you have access to a UNIX/Linux shell, then you can use Lynx (a text only browser), which does not support JavaScripts, and will display only text and regular “a href” tags. It’s a great way to see how a spider sees your site.

The vast majority, however, will need a tool to do this such as a spider simulator. There are several out there, many free and each different in how they simulate the spider - this is mainly to the fact that there are so many different spiders with their own engine methods. Here are some we recommend, each with it’s own benefits:

• SEO Tools - Search Engine Spider Simulator Tool: Best of the lot, breakes each section into viewable chunks to allow for real analysis
• Submit Express Meta Tag Analyzer: Besides simulating bots it also provides meta tag analysis
• Webmaster Toolkit Search Engine Spider Simulator: Simply strips out the HTML tags from the page you specify

So what does it mean in real terms?  If your site work without graphics or JavaScript, then you have a search engine friendly site and can expect good rankings.

If after simulating that this is not the case, it may be a good idea to head back to the drawing board and rethink your website.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 12:15 pm and is filed under SEO Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.