Easy way to check what search engines finds on your website to index.

In today's web world it's very difficult for webmasters to keep there website on top of the rank in popular search engines. The most commonly mistake done by webmasters are:

1. Lots of graphics on the web pages or lack of text based information-rich pages.
2. No static link to reach to a web page.
3. Ignoring the words which users would type to find your pages.

The easiest way to find out these issues is to look at your website from Search Engine Crawler's eyes. Almost all search engines could only see pure text from your web pages. JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash doesn't have any meaning for the crawlers.

'Lynx' a text based web browser is the tool which most of the search engines uses to see your website. All search engines recommends web developers to use this browser to examine their website. Here are the ways to use this browser.

1. Downloading 'Lynx' browser:

   'Lynx' browser is free and available for various operating systems. You could download it from
   
   http://lynx.browser.org/
   
   The instructions of using this browser are provided in the download. It's little difficult to use and surly not easy like other web browsers.
   
   If you do not want to spend time to learn this software and just want to do basic analysis of your website, we advise not to user it directly as there are other easier ways available as below.
   
   

2. Using Lynx Viewers:

   I found this better then the 1st approach for basic testing of my websites. There are few tools available on internet which internally use 'Lynx' and provide you the same results through your normal web browsers.
   
   They are very easy to use as you just have to enter the web page URL and you quickly get the result without any hassle of learning to use 'Lynx'. Another advantage is, using these Lynx viewer's you could navigate through your website by clicking the links, just like the search engine crawler does.
   
   One of such web based tool I found and use is available at:
   http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html
   
   "This website allows web authors to see what their pages will look like (sort of) when viewed with Lynx, a text-mode web browser."

We also recommend web developers to use HTML validation tools to find out HTML code problems in your web pages, which also become cause of poor search engine ranking. Most popular tool available on internet for free is:

http://validator.w3.org/

Good luck guys!

Please post your comments or questions below.

Thanks!