Archive for 'Seo'

Spider Checking Your Website For Top Search Engine Rankings

Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 5:06 am  
Leave your comment

If you want your website to work for both search engine spiders like the GoogleBot as well as people, you have to spider check your work. If you don’t spider check your work – how do you actually know it works?

Search engine optimization or SEO is an environment where humans have limited visibility. There is definitely a limit how much human eyeballs alone can see in terms of how the GoogleBot sees your website without actually spider checking your work on Google.

Search engine spiders like GoogleBot are robot software that crawl your website for ranking. Google says compared to humans, “Bots access pattern is completely different” – one of the greatest understatements in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines!

People tend to assume Google rankings are much more automatic than they actually are due to this difference between how humans view a website and how robot search engine spiders view it for ranking.

If you’re an SEO and live and breathe Google’s algorithms, many of the problems you deal with on a daily basis is bridging the gap between what works for human visitors to your website and what works for search engine spiders that bring traffic.

Search engine visitors are the most affordable way of getting free, well targeted traffic to your website. However, one of the biggest SEO mistakes most people make is assuming their web designer is also a search engine optimization expert or SEO.

In most instances, you should not expect the person primarily concerned with the look and feel of your website and its coding to also keep up with the latest in Google’s algorithms that are constantly evolving and updating. While web design and SEO are both at the heart of your website’s functionality, never assume your web designer is also an SEO expert.

SEO is a different knowledge and software set than most web designers can devote time to or should be expected to stay on top of and perform at the highest SEO levels. SEO is also a one strike you are out environment. You can do a hundred things right but get one important element of SEO wrong and it can undo everything else you do.

The question to ask that can often make this point clear is to ask your web designer, “How do you spider check your work?”

Although Google’s Webmaster Guidelines provides tools and guidance as to how to check a website through a spider’s eye view – like looking at the site with a Lynx text based browser or use the fetch as Googlebot tool in Google Webmaster Tools – in fact, very few web developers have actually read and followed Google’s guidelines .

This is why spider checking your website is so important to see if what you thought you were communicating on the Internet is actually being seen and ranked on Google. If you haven’t spider checked your website, you simply can’t tell with human eyes alone if it is working on search engines. Here are a few easy ways to do that.

Site:Search

First enter into the Google search box:

site:yourdomain.com

A site:search is the single most important diagnostic search on all of the major search engines that tells you how that search engine views your website. Don’t put a space after the colon in a site:search or you won’t get the right results

Because your root domain without any slashes after the domain name is the top of your site’s hierarchy, you always want to see your root homepage as the top result of a site: search on Google.

If you don’t see your homepage at the top of a site:search, there may be a problem. Most of your ranking strength is focused in your homepage where the majority of the external links to a site usually point. The lack of appearance of your homepage at the top of a site:search on Google is one of the ways you can see if your site is under a penalty or downgrade – although this is not conclusive evidence of that fact alone.

Note carefully how your homepage displays with a site:search in Google’s and Bing’s listings. 65 characters are displayed of your homepage title in blue text at the top of your search engine listing, 150 characters of meta description appear under it – or a snippet of text from your body text that matches the keywords from a search request.

Click Your “Cached “Link

Next, on Google and Bing move your cursor to the right of the search engine listing to make your “Cached” link appear. On Yahoo, the cached link appears below the listing. Note the cached date – the last time the spider returned to your site for ranking.

If you get the result “Your search – site:yourdomain.com – did not match any documents,” that means either your site is not being crawled and indexed on Google – or you’ve entered the domain incorrectly so check your spelling carefully. It is also possible it has been removed from the index as a result of a penalty in extreme cases, although most of Google penalties don’t result in this extreme an action.

One thing you do want to look at is if Google is displaying the cached date immediately, or sitting on the results for a while running spam tests before publishing them. If Google is publishing the cache immediately, that’s a good sign.

Click “Text-only version” of your Google cache

Click the “Text-only version” link in the upper right corner of Google’s cache.

This strips the website down to the body text and image alternative text associated with graphic images that Google sees for ranking. After clicking the “Text-only version” link upper right corner of Google’s cache, many websites have major portions of their site or even the whole site disappear – meaning Google can’t see your content for rankings.

Clicking back and forth in Google’s cache of your website between the “Full version” and “Text-only version” upper right corner link is how you spider check your work to see if the GoogleBot and humans are seeing the same thing.

Google only gives you rankings for keywords it sees on your website in the “Text-only version” – unless you have links that read those keywords.

Unless you perform this test, you simply can’t tell if spiders are seeing your site properly or not – and very often, they aren’t and the web developer and site owner don’t know it. When Google can’t see important elements of your site as humans do, the result is that you have been hidden rather than promoted on the Internet.

Spider Check Your Keyword Densities

Next, enter a search you want to compete for and find your search result on Google. Once again, move your cursor to the right of the Google listing to make the “Cached” link appear and click it. Now you will see exactly how Google sees your keywords that are highlighted in the cache that match the keywords entered in the search.

To get an approximation of your site’s keyword densities that you want in most cases to be between 1-2%, copy and paste Google’s “Text-only version” into Microsoft Word and get a word count of how many words Google sees in the body text and image alternative text of the page. Now do a “Control find” for your keywords to see how many times they are actually mentioned.

1% keyword density is your keywords appearing once in a hundred words – 2% twice in a hundred words. You can compete for many searches with keyword densities outside of this 1-2% average, but you may not compete across as broad a range of searches as each keyword algorithm is very unique. Keep in mind your rankings are also dependent upon your keywords appearing in the link text pointing to your site which you can’t see looking at the webpage because it is an offsite ranking factor.

Other important ways to spider check your work is with Google Webmaster Tools that give you a wealth of diagnostics about how your site appears on Google, and Google Analytics that shows your traffic and what keywords are actually bringing you visitors to the site.

While spider checking your work on Google takes less than thirty seconds involving three simple steps; 1) Move your cursor to the right of your Google listing to make the “Cached” link appear, 2) Click your “Cached” link, and 3) Click the “Text-only version” link in the upper right corner, never assume your webmaster has performed this vital test

If after doing this test, important elements humans see on your webpage are not visible to the GoogleBot, your content has been effectively hidden from the Internet for ranking rather than your website promoting you. You need to study Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to diagnose what the problem is – and carefully follow them if you want people to find you at the top of the rankings for a Google search.

Steve Penny SEO specializes in local searches and is the top ranked site on Google for Green Search Engine Optimization.  To find out more about optimizing your Google Places page for local searches, please visit http://StevePenny.com

Why Search Engine Automation

Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 12:10 am  
Comments Off


The internet also allows business on a for broader field than ever before. We write a web page in the US, and make a sale later that day in China. This global marketplace ensures no lack of customers. If you have a product to sell, there will be a buyer somewhere. The problem is not a lack of customers, but an abundance of competition.

To navigate the sea, the early sailors used the stars to find their way safely to their destination. For the new sea of information, we now use constellations called search engines. These search engines index what web page has which content so you can find what you need easily.

The search engine is the key to home business automation. People may see your signs or banners, and a few might remember them when they need you. Most will go to their trusted search engine. They use the search engines every day, so they can’t be wrong, right?

Search Engine Optimization is how we show what our web sites are. In doing this, we turn the trusted search engine into a trusted advertiser. Our customer types in his keywords, and the search engine returns your site. Sounds simple enough right?

You notice I said “keywords”. Part of SEO is choosing your keywords that a customer will use to find you. Google adwords has a free tool which will allow you to type in phrases and see how often they were searched for. You can then search for those phrases and see how stiff your competition is. Researching your keywords is the most important task for SEO. The rest of your work depends on this.

The search engine bots aren’t easily fooled. They have to give good content, or it makes the search engine look bad. This means you have to have good content as well. A blog is a great start letting you can write about your product or service, and get the word out at the same time. Submitting these articles to other sites also give you trackbacks which help the search engines increase the ranking of your site. Just remember to use your keywords in your articles since this content is what the search engines are looking at.

In addition to the search engines there are directories. These directories were the predecessors of the modern search engine. While these have fallen by the wayside for the most part, they are still in use. There are many services which will submit your site to these directories, and help some of your home business automation.

The reasoning behind SEO is simple. Without Search Engine Optimization, Google does not know who or what you are. There are many excellent articles out there to help you do it yourself, or there are people who make their living just doing SEO. Whatever you do, this is the start of automating your home business.

Ray Owen has been a network engineer for fifteen years, and now owns Freenetbuz Home Business Automation. You can also follow his blog on home business automation here Automating Your Home Business blog.

Shortcut to practical information about effective keyword research – study this page.

Tips To Design A Successful Website

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 10:49 am  
Comments Off


All people that start a website would like for it to be successful, and by that I mean that it actually makes money online. If this is your desire there are many things you must do for your website to be a success.

You need to have a fast loading website that loads in under 8 seconds, nobody likes to wait for pages to load. You want to optimize your website for the search engines by using the right kind of Meta Tags and content description. About all of the web traffic comes from the main search engines and there are about 6 or so of them. By submitting to these search engines monthly you will stay up to date on them.

All the backgrounds should be simple and friendly to readers, do not put things there to draw attention away from the article. Keep your backgrounds the same throughout the site, make it clean and no wild colors. When you are deciding what color the website will be, pick colors that kind of match the topic. Animated graphics are distracting so use graphics sparingly, too many graphics can make a website look unprofessional plus they slow the load time down.

A home page should tell you what the website will be about, like if it is about steps to make money online, you should stay on that topic. If it is difficult to understand what the site is about then making money will be unlikely.

You should not have to many banner ads, limit banners to maybe 2 or 3 and it is best not to put them on the top of web page. Use the right grammar and spelling this keeps it looking professional. Always make sure the links are working properly, you do not need errors popping up on users. Put the contact information easy to see on each page and respond to comments quickly if you have that option on the website.

Navigating the website should be easy, so place navigation links together at the top of page and at the bottom or sides. If you have a bunch of links be sure to use text links, because images take longer to load. If you use backlinks for seo or swap website links with other website owners for search engine rankings it will be best to have a page just for these links. Any site that is successful or makes money online will have these kind of pages to build their link popularity.

The website logo should be placed on each page and have navigational links on every page of the website. If you plan to use sound on the website, fix it were the visitors have to click on a object or link before the sound starts.

To keep visitors coming back you should add new content, at least every two weeks. You can even give ebooks away to help promote your website. If you have your own ebook you can spread your sales information and links throughout the ebook. Some of the best selling products on the web is information or “how to” products. Provide your visitors with quality, informative articles that is about your content, if your site is about “steps to make money online starts with traffic” then stay on that subject throughout the website. The articles can be written by you or you can use other author’s articles to help cut down on the work load. Most articles you find in the article directories can be republished free as long as you include their bio box.

A simple website , with one main topic should be the plan for your website to be able to succeed at internet marketing. Using these steps it want be long till you start making money online.

Find timely ideas to free traffic – your own knowledge pack.