How does google view your site?

Google sees your blog through it’s crawlers - you knew it ! But there are differences in how a human visitor sees your site and a crawler like Google. Which is why it’s important for you to optimize your wordpress/blogger blog so that crawlers see what they want and humans too.Neither one should miss a point.

So the questions are

• How does a crawler see your blog?
• What are the things that a crawler looks for in a website?
• What are the things that it tags your blog with?
• What are the things that it’s not supposed to see?

Let’s see. Firstly, let me introduce you to a handy tool that helps you do this task. It’s called the Poodle Predictor. It shows you whichever site you want in diagnostic mode as Google spider sees it. It’s also called the spider simulation test.

- A crawler verifies your meta tags first and foremost, collects information in the CONTENT and DESCRIPTION tag. Also the TITLE attribute, this is very important as this may be the first thing by which Google tags your blog. So make sure you have the best Title and Description tags ready when a google crawler visits your wordpress/blogger blog.

- Links.
Links are the next most important thing that a google crawler looks for in your blog.So everything in the a href attribute will be collected by Google. And it does an analysis there - how many of them in a page? What content is available in those sites? What is the anchor text used?
It’s recommended that if you are really serious about optimizing a particular page, make sure that out of the total number of outgoing links in your blog(probably the blogroll column), at least half of them relate to your primary keyword.
For Example - Your primary keyword is “Search Engine Optimization Tips” then in the outgoing links make sure that the anchor texts used are related to the primary keyword like “Search Engine Optimization” and “Search Engine Optimization blog” etc.
As the number of primary keyword related outgoing links increase, the more the chances of strengthening your primary keyword on the page.

- Textual Content and Headers
Next is your textual content and information contained in your wordpress/blogger blog.There are more subcategories here like the keyword density and header use. The google crawler scans for number of H1 tags in your textual content.H1 tags are considered most important piece of information by Google crawler. So make sure you have the primary keywords in your H1 headers. Importance is also given to other header texts, and the importance decreases with the tags like H2, H3 and H4.

- Spamming/ Keyword stemming
As you know Google is clever in detecting spam, it keeps a keen eye on whether there are any overly repeated keywords on your blog and links. So please don’t link to link farms/spammish websites and don’t use keywords beyond the density of 6%. Anything more than that is pure spam to google.

The Spider simulation tool tells you how many H1..H2 etc tags are seen on your blog, how many ALT tags are available, what are the keywords present in it etc. It colors those particular codes that a crawler sees and marks it up for you. So it’s easy to make out as to what’s seen and what’s not by a crawler. Check it out and have fun!

Update ——-
The Poodle Predictor link is dead - Instead try this Tool - http://www.seositecheckup.com

Related SEO Tips and Articles:

• What is an SEO friendly layout - Highlighting your content with it
  Ensuring that you have a SEO friendly layout is...
• What are Primary and Secondary Keywords in SEO ?
  Keywords are the building blocks of your blog. They...
• Importance of footer text in SEO
  Read further only if you are serious about SEO.Have...
• Get serious with off site optimization and incoming links
  Before writing this article, I had two thoughts. Should...
• How to submit a website to Google
  Thinking of submitting your blog to Google? If you’d...