Befriending the Search Engine Spider and Dominating Search Engine Optimization

Search engine spider bots are everywhere. They’re in every figurative nook and cranny to be found on the web – and every time you update your site, you can be sure they’ll find out about it sooner or later. However, you shouldn’t be afraid of this internet infestation. If you familiarize yourself with the way these creepy crawlers of the web function and gear your search engine optimization strategies to fit their demanding needs, they may reward you with the highest of rankings to be held in the competitive arena that is SERPs. Listed here are some of the free tools the SEO pros use for crawl analysis:

Spider Bot Analysis Tools

• SEO-Browser.com

With SEO-Browser, your analytical efforts can go far beyond viewing the source code of a given website — you’re privy to far more characteristics and features, allowing you to view a site just as the search engine spiders do. When you analyze a URL in advanced mode, you’re given access to the IP address, number of cookies, number of links (both internal and external), if a robots.txt is present, the text to page weight ratio, number of images, etc.

• Xenu’s Link Sleuth ™

A free tool that essentially acts as your own personal search engine spider, Xenu is a lightweight app that allows you to crawl through a page to check and re-check link errors. Xenu will report any errors it finds via a simple, easy to read report, making this a great tool for search engine optimization beginners!

• Log File

For Unix users, this fast, efficient log parsing script gives you access to the raw server log files of a website for in depth search engine spider bot analysis. It extrapolates the important crawl instances, for your viewing pleasure, from dense amounts of data.

Maximizing the Efficacy of Your Efforts

The above tools are fantastic for pulling important data for designing effective SEO strategies, but they don’t hold your hand in the process. You’re ultimately left to interpret the data how you will. Once you’ve been familiarized with the dos and don’ts of search engine optimization, the information will prove to be a key asset for maximizing search marketing endeavors.

*Photo “Hexapod” courtesy of Flickr user masochismtango under Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic CC license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/masochismtango/ / CC BY-SA 2.0