So Just Exactly What is your Site "Saying to the Search Engines"?

At IOM, we get to talk to lots of people who want their site to appear on the first page of the Search Engines for their " target phrases", the pole position on Google being defined as the "holy grail" for them all.

Now we are not going to go into which phrase they should want to be found under, as that is another story and is all about the important topic of Keyword Research, mixed up with a lot of common sense and some good old guesswork. No this article is all about what your site "looks like" from the Search Engines point of view.

So how does your site look to the Search Engines?

This is a bit of a complicated topic, as it brings in all sorts of areas like "linking strategy" and relevance and all that sort of thing, but for the purpose of simplicity, let us just concentrate on what is on the home page of your site, and then let us take this filtering process one step further and just look at just the text on the page, this being the basic "food" of the search engine's spiders.

So how can I see just the text on the page and thus see what the Search Engines see?

Tf you haven't got the tool bar, just go to Google and type site:http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk into the Search box. Then, providing Google knows about your site at all, you will get a list of all the pages in its database. Normally this starts with the "home" page and clicking on the "Cached" link underneath the listing will show a page with all the images etc on it, again just click on the blue "cached text" only link on the fourth line and as above in "Hey presto fashion" you will see just the text.

If you have the Google tool bar installed, just click on the "Page Rank" button and you'll see a drop down list, choose "Cached SnapShot of page" and then click on the blue "cached text" only link on the fourth line. Hey presto you will see just the text.


Does this text say what you do and what you want to be found under?

The next simple question is, Does this text say:-

• What you do
  
• Include the words you want to be found for
  
• SHOUT the really important words (using bold etc)