When thinking about how well one of your webpages is dresigned for SEO, it is very important to remember that the search spiders do not view pages in a pretty HTML format like you and I do. Generally speaking, when a spider visits your page it will see it as a text browser would. Knowing how the spiders see your webpages can really help you to make minor adjustments and/or “fixes” to improve the SEO of your pages. Here are a few online tools that can help you see your page as Googlebot or another search spider would.
- Spiderview- This tool is easy to use and offers several nice features. Spiderview will show you the overall page content without all the CSS, Javascript, and other non-text coding. It will also make a list of all internal and external links, including the anchor text of each.
- SEOchat’s Spider Simulator Tool- The folks over at SEOchat have always offered some quality tools and this is a simple, but handy tool to use. In my opinion, it isn’t quite as easy to use as Spiderview, but it basically does the same task by displaying a page that is stripped of CSS and HTML coding.
- SEO Browser- My favorite of these tools is the one at seo-browser.com. In addition to showing a CSS-stripped version of the webpage, this tool also has an advanced mode that shows details like the page metadata, number of links on the page, header status code, number of images, and other bits of information. This is a great tool to try out on your site and see how things look.
Using these tools effectively takes some knowledge of SEO, but it can be very helpful to see your pages as the spiders do in order to know what unseen issues could be hurting your rankings in the SERPs.
