It sounds like the title of a big budget sci-fi flick headlined by Hollywood's latest star. While bot-vision may not be THAT glitzy and glamorous, it's certainly a subject of interest to web designers, search industry members, and ultimately business owners and managers. So, what is it that bots see that users don't? And how do you look through their eyes?
To see a web page from a search engine indexing bot's perspective, it helps to start with some basic fundamentals. Bots don't read images and view the page without CSS, so in essence a bot is looking at your site as a stripped down wireframe. Building on that fundamental understanding of how a search bot sees the page, it's easy to understand the next, less objective element: site structure. Bots are computer programs in and of themselves, so they possess a Spock-like craving for well-organized site structure. In essence a bot is looking at an x-ray of your site to understand it's underlying structure, and won't be fooled by design or other work-arounds that users may understand.
SEO-Browser: A Search Marketers X-Ray Machine
To see your web page through a search engine spider's eyes, a good starting point is always SEO-Browser.com. This free online utility will display a webpage without CSS and with images removed. In addition it will display ALT tags or image names for the images that it has hidden. This first look will get you started thinking like a search engine bot.
As a nice bonus, SEO-Browser also provides additional valuable SEO information via an Advanced Mode. With this feature, in-depth information such as hosting IP address, # of on-page links, and page size are combined with page title, META description, and text character counts.
Dr. Spock's Guide to Interpreting Bot-Vision
Viewing the background structural elements of your website is helpful, but to best utilize your newfound information, you will need to be able to formulate some educated assessments based on a search bot's programmed approach. First and foremost, bots crave sound organization. In tech terms, that means effective use of structural coding elements such as title, description, and heading tags.In the first SEO-Browser image, you may have noticed that some text was in a larger font size than others. This constitutes varying levels of structure, with headings being larger and content being smaller. You want your site to have an outline-like structure when you view it in SEO-Browser, and the terms in larger font size should reflect a breakdown of the information in your title and description.
You also want to make sure ALT tags are present, and that there is not any important, keyword-rich content hidden in site images that will not be visible to search bots. And keep in mind that content of the top of a page is typically valued higher than content at the bottom, so make sure your important content is at the top when you view the page in SEO Browser.
If all of the above is in place, you probably have a solid foundation for search indexing.
