Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [39]
Figure 4-10: Disabling CSS
You should start seeing a very different layout and style for your website. This is very close to how the search engines see your site. By stripping out the images, scripts, and templates, you can get an idea of the base level of your pages, the actual content in those pages, and their structure (Figure 4-11).
Figure 4-11: Mozilla.org, stripped down to the basics. This is what the search engines “see.”
Search Status Plug-In
Another handy free tool in the Firefox browser is the Search Status plug-in, and it gets updates frequently to allow for search engine changes. Although this great little tool has many features (see Figure 4-12), on a regular basis I rely on the few discussed here.
Figure 4-12: The Search Status plug-in
Search Status provides a quick way to find the websites linking to a specific page or domain, as reported by the major engines (see Figure 4-13). This is a fast way to get from the web page directly to the resources at the search engines.
Figure 4-13: Backward links reports in Search Status
Search Status also provides the ability to find the page counts in the search engines (see Figure 4-14). This allows a fast method of accessing the page count of your website as reported by the top three search engines from a single click. This will let you know whether the search engines are indexing the website, as addressed on Monday of this chapter.
Figure 4-14: Search Status page count tools
Search Status additionally provides some very handy tools. Viewing and recognizing the Robots.txt file and Sitemap.xml file is important and will be covered in Chapter 15. The purpose of highlighting NoFollow links is covered in Chapter 16. NoFollow is an attribute that is placed on an outgoing link. By adding that attribute, you tell the search engines that the destination website is not trusted, nor should the link be counted in the popularity assessment.
The link report gives a quick status of the number of internal (within the website) site links and external (going to other websites) links on the page. There are also a number of options to view the rank of the page measured by Alexa, Google, and a few others. These are meant to provide some measure of importance per page; however, these measurements are largely unreliable because they are based on limited data. It is best not to focus a strategy around these measurements, but they can be helpful as you gain more experience in marketing online. As your comfort level with online marketing increases, you’ll find your understanding and application of these tools growing as well.
Thursday: Follow the W3C Accessibility Checklists
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a standards community that develops goals and recommendations for accessibility and programming. Its accessibility guidelines are a wonderful evaluation for the technical programming of your website. The current (2.0) guidelines are very open and leave a lot for interpretation. The old guidelines (1.0) were developed in the form of a checklist, which I still prefer today as a healthy check-up for any website.
The 1.0 checklist for accessibility is at www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/full-checklist. The 2.0 guidelines are at www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/. Finally, a quick-reference guide for the 2. 0 guidelines, with links and resources, is at www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/.
Checking the accessibility of a website is a very relevant practice. As you review the Webmaster Guidelines and the W3C accessibility guidelines, you may notice a lot of crossover. That is because accessibility and search engine–friendliness are the same. Search engine spiders are the most “disabled” users that will come to your website. They cannot “see” your images or movies, “hear” your music files, or follow convoluted programming; they error out with certain JavaScripts, and they don’t eat cookies (a tracking tool). As such, when your site performs well in accessibility tests, it will also perform well by allowing search engines to find