The Spider view of your website?

See Your Site with the Eyes of a Spider

Making efforts to optimize a website is nice however what counts is however search engines see your efforts. whereas even the foremost careful improvement doesn't guarantee ace position in search results, if your website doesn't follow basic program optimization truths, then it's quite sure that this website won't score well with search engines. a technique to examine ahead however your SEO efforts square measure seen by search engines is to use an enquiry engine machine.

Spiders Explained

Basically all program spiders operate on a similar principle – they crawl the online and index pages, that square measure keep in an exceedingly information and later use numerous algorithms to work out page ranking, relevancy, etc of the collected pages. whereas the algorithms of hard ranking and connection wide take issue among search engines, the manner they index sites is a lot of or less uniform and it's vital that you just grasp what spiders have an interest in and what they neglect.

Search engine spiders square measure robots and that they don't browse your pages the manner a personality's will. Instead, they have an inclination to check solely explicit stuff and square measure blind for several extras (Flash, JavaScript) that square measure meant for humans. Since spiders verify if humans can realize your website, it's price to contemplate what spiders like and what do not.

Flash, JavaScript, Image Text or Frames?

Flash, JavaScript and image text don't seem to be visible to go looking engines. Frames square measure a true disaster in terms of SEO ranking. All of them may well be nice in terms of style and value except for search engines they're completely wrong. An unbelievable mistake one will create is to own a Flash intro page (frames or no frames, this can hardly create things worse) with the keywords buried within the animation. confer with the program Spider machine tool a page with Flash and pictures (and ideally no text or incoming or outward-bound hyperlinks) and you may see that to go looking engines this page seems virtually blank.

Running your website through this machine can show you quite the actual fact that Flash and JavaScript don't seem to be SEO favorites. In a way, spiders square measure like text browsers and that they do not see something that's not a chunk of text. thus having a picture with text in it suggests that nothing to a spider and it'll ignore it. A workaround (recommended as a SEO best practice) is to incorporate significant description of the image within the elevation attribute of the Are Your Hyperlinks Spiderable?

The search engine spider simulator can be of great help when trying to figure out if the hyperlinks lead to the right place. For instance, link exchange websites often put fake links to your site with _javascript (using mouse over events and stuff to make the link look genuine) but actually this is not a link that search engines will see and follow. Since the spider simulator would not display such links, you'll know that something with the link is wrong.

It is highly recommended to use the <noscript> tag, as opposed to _javascript based menus. The reason is that _javascript based menus are not spiderable and all the links in them will be ignored as page text. The solution to this problem is to put all menu item links in the <noscript> tag. The <noscript> tag can hold a lot but please avoid using it for link stuffing or any other kind of SEO manipulation.

If you happen to have tons of hyperlinks on your pages (although it is highly recommended to have less than 100 hyperlinks on a page), then you might have hard times checking if they are OK. For instance, if you have pages that display “403 Forbidden”, “404 Page Not Found” or similar errors that prevent the spider from accessing the page, then it is certain that this page will not be indexed. It is necessary to mention that a spider simulator does not deal with 403 and 404 errors because it is checking where links lead to not if the target of the link is in place, so you need to use other tools for checking if the targets of hyperlinks are the intended ones.

Looking for Your Keywords

While there are specific tools, like the Keyword Playground or the Website Keyword Suggestions, which deal with keywords in more detail, search engine spider simulators also help to see with the eyes of a spider where keywords are located among the text of the page. Why is this important? Because keywords in the first paragraphs of a page weigh more than keywords in the middle or at the end. And if keywords visually appear to us to be on the top, this may not be the way spiders see them. Consider a standard Web page with tables. In this case chronologically the code that describes the page layout (like navigation links or separate cells with text that are the same sitewise) might come first and what is worse, can be so long that the actual page-specific content will be screens away from the top of the page. When we look at the page in a browser, to us everything is fine – the page-specific content is on top but since in the HTML code this is just the opposite, the page will not be noticed as keyword-rich.

Are Dynamic Pages Too Dynamic to be Seen At All

Dynamic pages (especially ones with question marks in the URL) are also an extra that spiders do not love, although many search engines do index dynamic pages as well. Running the spider simulator will give you an idea how well your dynamic pages are accepted by search engines. Useful suggestions how to deal with search engines and dynamic URLs can be found in the Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs article.

Meta Keywords and Meta Description

Meta keywords and meta description, as the name implies, are to be found in the <META> tag of a HTML page. Once meta keywords and meta descriptions were the single most important criterion for determining relevance of a page but now search engines employ alternative mechanisms for determining relevancy, so you can safely skip listing keywords and description in Meta tags (unless you want to add there instructions for the spider what to index and what not but apart from that meta tags are not very useful anymore).