Have you ever dreamed of owning a treasure map? A real one? A map that showed you exactly where a trove worth millions of dollars was located? Unfortunately, since you are living in the real world the chances of owning the map and finding buried treasure are nil.
Or are they? Today’s treasure isn’t buried. It’s spread across a vast online network called the Internet and it involves the nascent science of SEO.
As the science of SEO has developed, so have the SEO tools. One tool that you should be aware of is called a web crawler simulator, which can significantly help improve SEO strategies. The web crawler simulator essentially shows you how search engines are viewing your website so you can respond accordingly, tweaking your SEO strategies to reflect the algorithms of the search engines.
What is a web crawler simulator?
First, let’s make sure we understand what a web crawler simulator is. That requires backing up a bit and making sure we understand what a web crawler is. A web crawler is a complex computer program that systematically “crawls” or searches the Internet and forms search engine entries from what it reads. A good way to think of it is like a giant automated indexing tool for the Internet. The “index” in this case is search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Some people refer to web crawlers as web spiders.
That helps us understand what a web crawler simulator is. A web crawler simulator helps you to analyze your website according to the search engine web crawlers.
What can a web crawler simulator do?
If you have a tool that tells you how Google is looking at your site, you have a treasure map. Taking your site to the first page of a Google search engine is essentially like striking gold. The web crawler simulator can help to take you there.
Web crawler simulators do not look like very attractive maps. Gone are the frayed parchments and the red “X.” A web crawler simulator simply shows you what the web crawler “sees” when it crawls your page. The result is a bland readout of HTML coding, sans pictures.
The new perspective—viewing your website through the eyes of a crawler—can help you make changes that will improve the SEO quality of your site. It demonstrates your keyword density and your metadata. It is a “dry run” of how the crawler will look at your website, and therefore where you’ll end up in line when Google, Yahoo, or Bing return results from a search engine query.
Free Web Crawler Simulators
Here are a few common web crawler simulators that you can try:
- http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/googlebot-spoofer/index.htm
- http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php
- http://www.seobench.com/search-engine-crawler-simulator/
- http://www.mydigitallife.info/tools/search-engine-spider-and-crawler-simulator/
Nobody ever said that treasure hunting was easy work. It still takes time, requires that you dig a little bit, and you may end up with some sore muscles. But I think you’ll be glad you did.