How to Check Your Website for Search Engine Friendliness. One way to check your website to see if it's search engine friendly is to configure your browser to not display any graphics, not to use plugins and not to run JavaScripts. If your site only shows a blank screen in such a case, that's what the search engine will see as well. If you only see a few meaningless words on the screen, then that's what the search engine will think your site is about as well. If you find you cannot visit any other pages on your website from the main page, the search engines will have the same problem as well.
The easiest browser to use for such checks is the free Opera web browser. The latter makes it very easy to disable and re-enable everything, either on a site-by-site basis, or on a global basis. To globally disable the things I mentioned, hit the F12 key (F12 for Windows and Linux users; Alt+F12 if you use a Mac), uncheck "Enable Java", "Enable plug-ins" and "Enable JavaScript". You can enable them again easily by hitting the same F12 (or Alt+F12 for Mac) key and checking those items. To disable images, hit Shift+I (all operating systems). (This is a toggle between "No images", "Cached Images", and "Show Images", so hitting Shift+I again will switch between these three modes.)
This is not a foolproof solution for checking your website though, since Opera is a modern frames-capable browser, so sites using something called "frames" will still show up correctly in Opera, even though they won't necessarily be indexed properly by a real search engine. But for quick checks, this is by far the most user-friendly way to do that works on all the major desktop operating systems. Note that I'm not forcing you to switch to Opera or anything like that - use whatever browser you like as your normal browser. But as a web developer, since you will probably have all the major browsers around to test your site anyway, you should use Opera's additional convenience features to give your web pages a quick going-over.
(Additional tip: while you do this, you can also check how your site will appear in small-screen devices like mobile phones by hitting Shift+F11 on Windows/Linux or Shift+Alt+F11 on the Mac. Hit the same key again to return to normal mode.)
What Do You Want to Rank For?
A very important thing to bear in mind when designing your website is to ask yourself what your site is all about. What do you want to rank for? If you want to rank for "Widget X", the words "Widget X" must appear on your website in ordinary, visible text. This may seem obvious when I say it, but judging from what I see when I review some websites, it may not necessarily be apparent to some people. (Don't take this as an accusation or anything like that, it wasn't obvious to me either, when I first started.)
So here's the article in a nutshell: When someone searches for a particular term, and you want your site to be listed for those keywords, the terms must appear somewhere on your page, or the engine will not know your site talks about those things. And those words, to be most effective, must appear in normal text, not in a picture, not created by JavaScript, and not embedded in a Flash window on your page. You also need links pointing to your website. [ thesitewizard.com ]
The easiest browser to use for such checks is the free Opera web browser. The latter makes it very easy to disable and re-enable everything, either on a site-by-site basis, or on a global basis. To globally disable the things I mentioned, hit the F12 key (F12 for Windows and Linux users; Alt+F12 if you use a Mac), uncheck "Enable Java", "Enable plug-ins" and "Enable JavaScript". You can enable them again easily by hitting the same F12 (or Alt+F12 for Mac) key and checking those items. To disable images, hit Shift+I (all operating systems). (This is a toggle between "No images", "Cached Images", and "Show Images", so hitting Shift+I again will switch between these three modes.)
This is not a foolproof solution for checking your website though, since Opera is a modern frames-capable browser, so sites using something called "frames" will still show up correctly in Opera, even though they won't necessarily be indexed properly by a real search engine. But for quick checks, this is by far the most user-friendly way to do that works on all the major desktop operating systems. Note that I'm not forcing you to switch to Opera or anything like that - use whatever browser you like as your normal browser. But as a web developer, since you will probably have all the major browsers around to test your site anyway, you should use Opera's additional convenience features to give your web pages a quick going-over.
(Additional tip: while you do this, you can also check how your site will appear in small-screen devices like mobile phones by hitting Shift+F11 on Windows/Linux or Shift+Alt+F11 on the Mac. Hit the same key again to return to normal mode.)
What Do You Want to Rank For?
A very important thing to bear in mind when designing your website is to ask yourself what your site is all about. What do you want to rank for? If you want to rank for "Widget X", the words "Widget X" must appear on your website in ordinary, visible text. This may seem obvious when I say it, but judging from what I see when I review some websites, it may not necessarily be apparent to some people. (Don't take this as an accusation or anything like that, it wasn't obvious to me either, when I first started.)
So here's the article in a nutshell: When someone searches for a particular term, and you want your site to be listed for those keywords, the terms must appear somewhere on your page, or the engine will not know your site talks about those things. And those words, to be most effective, must appear in normal text, not in a picture, not created by JavaScript, and not embedded in a Flash window on your page. You also need links pointing to your website. [ thesitewizard.com ]
No comments:
Post a Comment