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SEO Text Browser Lets You Envision How Sites Appear to Search EnginesDec 15 2006 | SEO |
It’s a hard task in SEO to explain to an individual who is not technically apt how crawlers understand and interpret websites for the search engine results. I’ve been inclined to say to individuals that they need to view the page source and try to understand that the tags that certain keywords are enclosed in has an impact on how the site is analyzed by the crawlers (especially those who are insistent that search engines will understand their flash files). I’ve been meaning to write up a nice little blurb on some basics: “Look at the code for something that says H1. This means that there is heavy emphasis on the text there. Also, the closer your text is to the top, the more likely the search engines will process it, especially if your page source is large — it might not see what’s on the bottom.” But the HTML to them is gobbelygook, and we don’t want to confuse them too much.
So I was pleased to find today when doing more technical work that there’s a nice little SEO text browser that comes up when you look up a domain on the whois.domaintools.com search. It pretty much strips the code and shows what is being emphasized:
In this pop-up SEO Text Browser, the entire site is interactive; links are clickable, and you can see, for the most part, how pages read.
It currently is grabbing the data from seo-text-browser.com, yet that domain redirects to domaintools.com. My guess (and hope) is that the application, which is still marked as beta, will be expanded upon in the near future with a dedicated site for the SEO search.
So far, even though the tool appears to be a work in progress, it has a lot of promise and it looks to be a tool that will hopefully do some good basic analysis on sites in the future.
Posted by Tamar Weinberg at 12:50 pm
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December 15th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
This is really interesting- and will be something very, very helpful to show an SEO novice.
December 15th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
The tool is excellent for SEM/ SEO professionals and everyday site owners.
December 17th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
great for pros in a private setting, but I have a serious problem if this was pushed to consumers who may not grasp this is not the “real” website. i think when a website is presented in an incorrect way like this, there is some legal liability because it is interfering with the brand image of that website. displaying the website in a way that was not intended. no different if i created a browser that used my own stylesheet which destroyed the look of the website.
December 18th, 2006 at 9:47 am
Chucko — good point. However, I wouldn’t mind pushing it as an “educational tool” for consumers to understand how their sites are being processed. Ultimately, it is not doing anything that deviates much from the way the sites are spidered by search engines. There hasn’t been a tool that has existed to visually explain that process, and this lets the consumer know that if they are overly concerned about their brand, they need to make appropriate changes in order to put it out there in text.
March 16th, 2007 at 11:22 am
As more of the web is accessed by portable devices this is similar to how readers will view a website.
This is a wonderful tool. I particularly like the percentage SEO rating and then it tells you how to improve your site–as I just did!
The brand must be able to stand on its ability to communicate clearly in words. Content, of course, is king.
March 16th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Christopher, definitely true. I actually discovered a similar tool that you could also see site content from without accessing an external site. It’s called Prefbar and lets you see a site without Javascript, Flash, colors, or images. I would say it definitely complements the aforementioned tool!
April 10th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
I have used this in consideration when revamping my site and it has improved search results tremendously.
As for my CMS I have had to redesign a lot of functionality to trick the crawls in to thinking the pages are HTML and not PHP (search engines don’t like SID’s). Along with preventing crawls after they reach a certain depth in articles.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:38 am
You will find a similiar tool at www.seo-browser.com
This does the same thing
July 23rd, 2007 at 4:03 am
seo text browser in domaintools is nowhere to be found..pls help..
September 14th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Yes this tool help me for checking my website for getting informe about web crawl purpose.
December 8th, 2007 at 10:51 am
This is a great tool for anyone professional or beginner!