Using A Spider Simulator To See How Search Engines See Your Site
Oct 26th, 2008 | By Kevin | Category: Featured Posts, trafficIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Feedburner. Thanks for visiting!
One of the tools I use when evaluating a site for SEO, is called a spider simulator. I have been using the same one for several year now, from Summit Media in the UK. I really like the report it gives me. A lot of times, I will run a report on their site, and then print it through Adobe PDF and send the PDF to client to show them the basic problems with their site.
The spider simulator focuses on on-page factors of SEO. Basically, you give it a URL, and it goes out and scans the page like a search engine spider. The report that is generated, looks at a number of core criteria for on page factors.
Here a re the factors it looks at:
- Page Title
- Page Description Meta Tag
- Keywords Meta Tag
- Use of H1 Tags
- Alt Tags on images (Image Descriptions)
- HTML Size
- Total Size
- Retrieval Time
- Number of words in the Body Text
- Number of Links
- Broken Links
The tool from Summit Media grades and weights each of these criteria and gives your webpage a score based on what it finds. While this isn’t all there is to SEO, it is a great fundamental place to start.
In my opinion, I would rather start with a client here first and improve their onsite score before I begin link building and improving their offsite optimization. Optimizing a site for onpage factors is far easier because you are in complete control of the site yourself.
To use the Summit Media Spider Simulator go to:
http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/index.php
Originally from Wisconsin, I moved out to Salt Lake City over ten years ago on a six month software development contract. I now have over 15 years in software development, and was introduced to internet marketing back in 2003. During the wild west days, our business focused on content sites for Adsense revenue. As it became harder and harder to keep up with the search engines, our business has evolved, and forced us to focus on building lists and creating products. We now have a list of about 5000 interested in goal setting, and a small internet marketing list of about 500.