Your site, through the eyes of a bot

Got your website looking just the way you like it? Great news – but has it ever occurred to you that not every visitor might be seeing it the same way you do?

I’m not talking about human visitors (although that’s a whole issue in itself when you consider they may be viewing on a variety of screen resolutions, operating systems and browser combinations). I’m talking about the bots.

They may sound like characters from some science fiction dystopia, but bots are simply the name given to the automated ‘crawlers’ that visit your website every now and again in order to index it for the search engines.

They will ‘see’ your site very differently to your human visitors, caring only about the prominence given to various words and phrases, internal and outbound links, and your site structure. It might surprise you to see which keywords, seen through the ‘eyes’ of a bot, are given prominence.

Now you can, indeed, do just that. Google recently launched a Fetch as Googlebot application for webmasters, where you type in your URL and can see just how your page appears to Google.

With Fetch as Googlebot, you might finally get the data you need to fully understand just why your site doesn’t rank well for your desired keywords. But if it all seems a bit complicated, we at Notting Hill Web Design would be happy to take a look for you.