Spider vision: see the web like a search engine crawler
March 6th, 2009 | Published in Plugins, SEO
Spider-Man
Understanding the perspective of your target audience is critical for any marketer. For search engine marketers, this means getting inside the head of not just people, but also search engine crawlers. A simple Firefox plugin, the Web Developer plugin, will help you see with spider vision in three easy steps so that you can weed out search-engine-unfriendliness from your site like a superhero. Here’s how to use it.
- Disable CSS styles. Search engine crawlers believe it’s what’s on the inside that counts, so strip your website of its outer beauty! Disabling styles show you the real prioritization of the content on your page, a particularly interesting exercise for sites in a columnar or grid layout. It will also remove background images that may have contained text visible to a human.
- Disable JavaScript. Spiders ignore JavaScript, so you will, too. This will reveal whether your cleverly-designed, jQueried UI is hiding content from crawlers. And without JavaScript, your embedded Flash modules will disappear, too.
- Replace images with ALT attributes. How do crawlers read your beautiful GIF navigation and headlines? Find out! Do a quick replacement. If your images are replaced with nothingness, then you’ve got some ALT tag writing to do.
Congratulations, Peter Parker: you’re now viewing the web in spider vision! Now go use your newfound “web-slinger” powers for good!
