And how do other search engines view my website?
So, you built a pretty website with all the bells and whistles hey? Do you have any idea how “spiders” view your website as opposed to what humans see? Have you taken into account that “spiders” or “crawlers” (call them what you may) cannot “see” your award winning creative masterpiece like humans do?
What do I mean by that? What it means is that these little robots need FOOD and lots of it! (spider food) They need “titles” to see what the page is about, they need “headings” to see how you name your sections or paragraphs, they need great content that fits the description of these headers and last but not least, they need LINKS to follow in order to find other pages in your site.
Having poor navigation or no contextual links (links in your copy) does not really help Google find the rest of your site. Why not open your site up completely so that the little critters can see what is going on in your site? This will only benefit you.
It’s true that Google really, really loves the Sitemap page where you listed all your pages your website consists of, but we also want Google to crawl pages from descriptive contextual links we created for this purpose. Remember to use great “anchor text” to link to a page that has the same title as your anchor text link.
Let’s look at an example of how to use anchor text within your copy. Example: “We cater for children’s parties, offer horseback rides and horse riding lessons. We also have great wine tasting at Mount Rozier, and some awesome Valentines day ideas in Somerset West.”
This way we quickly send Google to those pages where it picks up even MORE contextual links to other pages within your site.
Run your site through this checker below to give you an indication of how Google and the other “bots” see your site:
(Lynx Browser (Text-based) viewer: The Lynx Viewer allows webmasters to see what their pages will look like when viewed with Lynx , a text-mode web browser. It is also presumably, how search engines see your site. In addition to that, it can help determine if web pages are accessible to the vision impaired.)
http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php
I have pasted these examples of how Google sees our Horse Riding in Somerset West website.
Have a look. I marked i few areas of importance that really helps Google understand your page.
So in future, plan your site carefully so that you get the most out of the search engines that visit your site. I build websites with spiders in mind but at the same time keeping the balance just right between humans and droids alike 
(p.s. – Please note that this may not be exactly the way Google or any other search engine see you site, but it serves as a good indication of the accessibility of your web page.)
Cheers guys
goodseo
6 comments ↓
Once again, a really good informative, down to earth article. You cover so many good basic things, with fantastic examples. This makes SEO so much easier to understand, where many might think it as some mystery guru mastery.
Although I do realize that there is so much more to SEO, what you show here is how we can o the basics right
You have to get more people to read this, as I believe they will benefit from it.
Great post Etienne, thanks.
The site map page is like the skeleton key to your website for Google and other spiders, but it definitely helps to make other keys available throughout your site as well.
Switching off the styles and/or using a lynx viewer is a great way to get a sense of how your site looks to spiders and often helps me to find better ways to structure pages in order to improve my on-page seo.
Thanks. This has been a great help in understanding those little critters that crawl around on my blog. I have one question, though: how does the linking to context-sensitive pages effects that other incomprehensible items such as follow-index, no-follow-index, no follow-no index etc.? Is there any relation?
Ok, that’s two questions. And a third: in following the above structure, does one not fall in the trap of actually writing for Google, instead of your readers?
Hi Emil, thank you for the great questions. I do not want to reinvent the wheel but your questions surrounding the tags are covered quite well in this article. This tag typically blocks Google from indexing this page and following links on this page. However using a robots.txt file to block entire folders/files or sub-directories is the way to go if you want to deny Google access to certain areas within your site.
The nofollow HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Googleblog also covers this tag quite well and Wiki has a nice definition of the nofollow tag.
Regarding your question whether one risks the fact that your website could become staccato, forced or unnatural is a real possibility if you do not create that good balance I spoke about earlier. Yes, write for humans but make sure you treat the critters the same by allowing them to see what your visitors see and steering them to a page you want them to find. Showing your visitors one thing and robots another could be construed as “cloaking“. Hope this sheds a little light on this rather heavy subject
thanks etienne, this is all realy helpful for a beginner with average intelligence like me. easy to understand, with loads of good tips to help me with my work. keep them coming and if possible plse put up some pics with girls in small bikinis to go with the blogs.
A really a really good informativea really good informative post.This has been a great help in understanding those little critters that crawl around blogs.
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