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How Do Search Engines See Your Site? Try Using a Spider Simulator to Learn MorePosted by Joe on July 29, 2009 in Crawlability |
If you want to understand someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. When it comes to how search engines understand your website, you should work mile in their shoes. Okay, maybe this is a stretch. What I am saying is that if you want to understand how search engine spiders view your site, you should utilize a spider simulator tool. This way you’ll get an idea of what they’re seeing.
There are numerous spider simulators out there. Each pulls data slightly different. However, overall you will get glimpse into the data that search engine spiders/bots are pulling from your site.
As you run your website through a couple spider simulators, here are few questions to keep in mind:
- How accurately is my information being displayed?
- Are my most important keywords appearing in the results?
- What is my keyword density?
- What links are the bots are following off of my homepage?
Here a couple of spider simulators that provide some decent information.
This is probably my favorite spider simulator. This simulator provides some of the most information in regards to on-page text, links, keywords, and keyword density.
This is another tool that can provide quite a bit of helpful information including page load time, alt text information, number of external and internal links:
These are just two of many spider simulator tools out there. Do a little searching around to see which one or two suits you best.
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