Search Engine Tips

TIP #1: A Text-Only Page View

Search engine bots (crawlers, spiders) see a web site very similar to a text-only browser. That is, no graphics or client-side scripts will be seen or executed. (Client-side scripts are downloaded and executed on your computer. Server-side scripts are executed by the web page server and only the results are downloaded.)

To view your site similar to what most search engine bots see, you can try to find a text-only browser, which is becoming almost extinct, or try the following trick.

Save the web page source to your desktop, using notepad or something similar as a .txt file. You can do this with a page on your computer or a page from a web site.
(In IE, right-click the on the page and then click View Source on the floating menu. The page’s source will be opened in Notepad.
In Mozilla click View Page Source on the floating menu. Click File|Save As and save to your desktop.
In Netscape, click View Source and then copy the source to Notepad.)
If you save a web page from the Internet, disconnect from the Internet. (If you don't disconnect, you will load the images for the page.)
Rename the file’s extension from .txt to .html.
Click the renamed file to open the file in your default browser.

The file will open but notice that all graphics, external CSS, and some JavaScripts are not displayed or activated.

Look at what is displayed and check the page for some of the following item:

Are text descriptions displayed where the images should be?
Does the page stand by itself without the images?
Does the page text describe what is on the page or what the page is presenting?

If the page is not informative without the images, you should rework the page because search engines ignore graphics but do read the graphics’ ALT and TITLE tag descriptions.

If you can find the page on your favorite search engine, see what the search engine’s description of that page is and where the words are found on the page. Does the search engine’s description reflect what the page is about or does the description appear to be random words rather than sensible? If the engine’s description say little about the page content, you need to rearrange the page so the engine finds more relevant text.