Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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And here is the same web page, viewed through a spider emulator.

Are you scared yet? There are lots of spider emulators available on the web.

We use

http://searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi

often because we like

its simplicity and its built-in link checking feature. Another of our favorites is:

http://

tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

. You’re going to view each of your landing pages

through a spider emulator today.

Here’s how to do it:

• Starting with your home page, go to

http://searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/

sim_spider.cgi

or the spider emulator of your choice and enter your page URL

into the emulator.

• Once you see your page as it is seen by spiders, ask yourself some questions:

Does this accurately represent the information I expected to see on my site? Is it

readable and in the correct order? Are my target keywords present?

• For any noted problems, consider possible solutions. For example, if the well-

crafted, keyword-rich content you added last month is not showing up, it may

be that it’s not rendering in standard HTML text. Print out this page and bring

it with you to your web developer to track down the problem. Or, are you see-

ing the same nonsensical image ALT tag (for example,

ImgFile01

) repeating

multiple times on the page? Make a note to have it removed or revised with

appropriate keyword-rich descriptions.

• Perform this check for each of your landing pages.

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