What Search Engines See
"When a search engine spider looks at your page, it essentially “reads” your site to find out what it’s about."
When a search engine spider looks at your page, it essentially “reads” your site to find out what it’s about.
There are parts of your page that the spider can read and parts that it can’t. Spiders don’t see your website like human viewers do. Instead of seeing all the images and flash animation that your visitors can see, it only reads the code that supports that web page.
As the spider crawls (or reads) the text in the code, it weighs different parts of the text more heavily than others, and, through a complex algorithm, determines what keyword phrases are most relevant on your site.
So if all the text of your site is located in images, it’s time to consider changing them to plain text. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time getting good search engine rankings.
That’s the first step in creating a website that is easily crawled by search engines. There are many more ways to make sure that your site is search engine friendly, but images are a good place to start – make sure that the search engine can at least read what’s on your web page.
How do search engines rank my site?
- The search engine crawls your site.
- It “reads” the text on your page.
- Through its algorithm, it decides what your site is about by determining what keyword phrases (ex: florida roofing company, pet groomers, or chicago restaurant reviews) are most relevant on your site.
- When someone searches for those keywords, if the search engine has determined that your site is relevant to that keyword phrase, your site will appear in the search engine’s results.
It weighs different parts of your page more heavily than others and decides what keyword phrases are most relevant on your site.