How to View Your Web Site as Search Engines See It

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For many who start out in web site management, they learn quickly from the experienced webmasters about search engine optimization. Such things as layout and keywords are usually discussed with many tips and tricks offered to improved a web site’s earch engine ranking. There are many web sites that are made up mainly of flash or images which can cause problems with search engines since they have difficulty reading either format.

One of the biggest tips is good unique content with lots of text. The text is what search engines use to rank a web site. In this post I will show you a quick method of viewing your web site as search engines may see it. This will allow you to determine if what the search engines see is how you expect them to see your web site.

View You Web Site’s Text

As mentioned above, many search engines have difficulty reading flash and image only web sites. The reason for this is because there is no text that they can use to rank a web site. Search engines will use the text to rank your site among various keywords in their results.

For someone managing a web site, you may want to view your web site with no images, or even CSS styles to see how a search engine will read your site.

There are web sites online that will display your web site as straight text with no CSS styles or images displayed. Many places may charge a small fee for this option, while others offer it for free. You could also install a text-only web browser and then open your site in that browser.

The easiest method that I found was to view the text-only version of your web site directly in Google, provided that it is ranked. To your web site’s text only version, use the following steps:

  1. Enter a search term in Google to display your web site in it’s results. For Technically Easy, I searched for “Technically Easy”.
  2. In the results, click the Cached link (see the figure below).

    3. Google's cached link of a Web site
    Click to view full size (24KB).

    Google will now retrieve a version of your web site it has cached. Keep in mind that since this is a cached version, it may not be up-to-date as to what is currently displayed on your web site.

  3. At the top of the cached page, click the cached text link. The figure below shows where this link is located.

    4. Google's cached text of a Web site
    Click to view full size (32KB).

  4. A cached text-only version of your web site will now appear. This is roughly how a search engine will view your web site. You will also notice the alternate tags for any images that you have included on your web site.

There are a few downsides to using this method:

  1. Your web site needs to be included in Google’s index.
  2. Only provides a text version of the cached page you are viewing. You will need to click the cached version of additional web pages from Google’s search results to view other pages.
  3. The cached text-only version may not be the most recent copy of your web site.

For a quick, easy, and free method of viewing a text-only copy of your web site, you may not care about some of the above points.

Summary

Search engines rank a site in specific keywords they find in the text on a web page. It may at times be beneficial to you to view a text-only version of your web page to see how a search engine may see it. Google’s cache provides a quick and easy method of viewing your web site without images and CSS styles loaded.

Although there are a few downsides to the method, you can easily ensure that the search engines are reading your web site as you would like them to read it.

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