SEO Text Browser is an easy tool which allows the user to view the same perspective that Google does when it crawls a website. As Google builds its search engine everyday, it sends an agent out into the world called Googlebot. This agent could be described as a robot scout because it looks around your website and then reports back to the Google mothership on everything it has seen. For those of you new to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Googlebot is the most important visitor to a website. Depending on the experience, it could recommend a website either be awarded top placement or be buried in a dusty janitor’s closet in building 46 at Google World Headquarters.
Today we are taking a look at our SEO Text Browser. This is a tool we wrote which loads a page in real time and then gives quick SEO tips. There is no reason for a sloppy page, so the first thing it does is make a quick check to see if there are any missing tags. Missing meta descriptions and Alt tags on images are common mistakes made by beginners and experts alike. For example, to the right we are taking a look at MattCutts.com. Every time a whois record is loaded on DomainTools.com, we fetch a copy of the homepage for that record (sometimes a cached copy). We then display how any search engine robot would view that page. You can locate this widget on the DomainTools’ whois page on the right hand side of any record.
Above the whois, we also have this summary display of what the search engine robot would have seen. As we can see in the example, Matt Cutts does not have a meta description for his page. For those of you that do not know, Matt is a Google Engineer, so it is a bit ironic that he does not populate this. Overall Matt’s front page lacks a lot of things and his score was a 68% for on-page content.
It is important to note, the SEO Score is only calculated for on-page information found on the front page of a website, so it is possible for everyone to achieve a perfect SEO Score of 100%. When we first launched the SEO Text Browser, we discovered we had missed a few Alt tags on our own front page. The browser can also be undocked and taken for a test drive on any web page, not just the front page. Just click on the browser in any whois page and a full browser will pop out of the page. As you browse the website, you are now viewing the website as a robot would see it. Robots cannot see images or read them, so be sure to use Alt tags and text on webpages.
The SEO Text Browser runs on JSON, so it will be possible for us in the future to allow anyone to take a copy of this program and embed it on any website. Look forward to this in a future release.
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