SEO tip: See What Search Engine Bots See

Are you a web developer or perhaps you might be curious as to what the search engine bots see when they visit your site? Maybe you are curious as to see if you have too much, or too little content on your site amongst the graphics you use? Here is my first Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tip to those who are curious as to what the search engine bots look at when they visit your graphically created web site.

Back in the day before the World Wide Web was graphical it was text based (gasp) and what browser did people use back in the day? Lynx.

A brief history of Lynx.

Initially developed in 1992 by students at the University of Kansas it was solely distributed as a hypertext browser for information within the campus then being modified to use an internet interface so that people around the world could ‘surf the web’. – Wikipedia Source

Designed on a Unix platform it is still used today on various operating systems such as Linux, DOS and now more recently Microsoft Windows.

That’s all great, but why should I use a text-based web browser?

Being text-based, Lynx shows you what your website or blog looks like without any graphics. Yes you could run one of the many Firefox plugins that disable your CSS, but you will still see your graphics. The search bots don’t care about graphics and running Lynx to see what your site looks like will also help you determine if your IMG ALT tags are properly set up as well. After all, search bots only look for text (keywords, phrases etc).

If you’re running a flavor of Linux, chances are you already have Lynx installed, but for MS Windows’ users you probably don’t have Lynx. The 2.8.5rel.1 release of Lynx can be downloaded from CSANT.info in a nice easily set up installer that you do not need to create a batch script to properly execute like for other releases require.

Once downloaded, run the installer executable and let it finish installing, then double-click on Lynx browser (if you don’t modify the install there should be an install icon on your desktop).

Now Lynx has a command-line interface, which means you navigate using the keyboard but easiest way to do it is by using the arrow keys as well as the page-up and page-down keys. Though the first command you will use (and use a lot) is the ‘g’ command which is short for Go-To. This is where you put in the URL of the web site you wish to see.

The above image is the first part you see of www.tyleringram.com when you first visit it. Notice how my left side navigation is the first thing that shows up (yes the columns are read left to right).

This image is more of the content of www.tyleringram.com this is what the search bots see when they visit my site, they don’t see the lovely self-created layout with its pretty graphics; they just see the plain text.

Now the above screenshot is of www.johnchow.com. Notice how John’s site shows more content first than the navigation links. Now this could be a strategy and I shall ask: Is having your navigation links on the right side better than the left side in terms of Search Engine Optimization? The content is read before the navigation links are and this might help the search engines put more emphasis on your content.

One thing I do when I create a site is after I have it up and running I will run Lynx and check out my creation. It helps when determining how well the site might do in regards to SEO. The other thing I like about Lynx is how fast it will load pages. I mean, since it has no use for graphics it skips over them and loads the text (content) in an easily readable layout.

If you are a developer of websites or wish to see what your web site may look like to the various search engine bots out there I would recommend downloading and installing Lynx and using it to see what your web site looks like. After all everyone wants better SEO rating correct?