Digital Marketing Mastery: Insights, Strategies, and Tactics for Success

How Does Google See My Website?

Penguin Update
Penguin 2.0 and Google

Google is constantly being changed to update the way that it sees WebPages. While Google openly talks about their goals of weeding out low quality sites that do not satisfy surfers with good quality content, the algorithms remain shrouded in secrecy. Here is a few of the ways that Google sees your website and how it comes up with the order of the results for related searches.

Educate Yourself

If you do not know how Google sees your website it is hard to improve your organic search ranking. You must educate yourself about search engine spiders and make sure that they can easily navigate your website. They are unable to pick up on more advanced features like JavaScript. WebPages written in HTML that validates, there shouldSEO be no issue in the bots working their way through your website.

Lynx

Lynx is a text browser that you can use to help you learn about how Google sees your website. It is a lot like a DOS window and can become quite confusing. There is no input available from the mouse and all commands must be put in via the keyboard. The text browser will show you a simple version of a desired webpage and let you compare it with what you regularly see. The text browser will not show you any pictures from a site. Instead it shows the alternative text that is associated with the picture instead. Look through your website with the text browser and make sure that all the links on the page work and that all the text is displayed. If you pass that test, your website should not have any problems allowing the search engine crawlers to look around the site. There is an even simpler way to test this by using a “spider simulator”. They can also show you information like the titles, text, keyword density, and links.

Google Crawlers

These spiders work to “see” your website and attempt to read any relevant content. They closely guard the secrets of their algorithm but upon further studying of results, you will begin to notice trends. People realized a long time ago that meta keyword tags were not as effective as they originally were. They do, however, use the titles of pages to figure out what the page is all about. They also use the headings to see how you section off your paragraphs. If someone asks Google for content that fits the description of your title or headers, you may be near the top of the ranking.

Things to Avoid and Things to Improve

By having a site with no context links or poor navigation, Google will have a hard time giving you a high rank. It is looking for the content on your website while also trying to weed out websites with little or no content available. By using anchor text, new custom website content, keywords, and some Google Tools, you should be able to get a good idea of what Google is looking for.

Google Tools

There are tools that help you get a glimpse of your website as Google sees it. These tools can make a big difference in your digital marketing strategy and raise your organic search results if you know how to use the data that is presented. They let you focus on what parts of your site Google sees as important and let you improve on weak areas.

You should sign up for Google Analytics and add your website to the Google Webmaster Tools. Enter a URL of a page that you want to check and the program will bring up various information about things that Google looks at as it decides your search engine rank. You can see exactly what keywords Google is seeing as it crawls your site. The Fetch as Google tool lets you see pages exactly as Google sees them. This information can help you troubleshoot your SEO strategy and try to make it better.

Finally, Noz can help to better understand Google rankings but can take up to a week to get a full report. It will show you where each page ranks and check if your website is easily crawled by Google. The full report it gives includes many essential components including the URL, meta descriptions, and the title. It also can quickly find common SEO errors on your site and fix them quickly, leaving your website easier to read and higher in the Google search ranks.

Leave a comment