Use Lynx to see how Googlebot is seeing your blog or webpage

Search engine optimization comes into picture when you want to put your blog on Google like search engines. We add pictures, flash, JavaScript etc to enhance the look of our blog but most of these things are not visible to the Googlebot (Google’s spider for search results). Googlebot or other spiders can see Text, HTML etc on your page, that’s why it is very important that your page should have relevant texts and the images should have “Alt”.

Image credit: evisibility

Lynx is a text only browser by using which you can see how your blog’s page will look when Googlebot will go thru that. Once you will check your pages, you can decide whether you need to add some extra texts on your webpage. Download the Lynx browser from here.

Below is the installation instruction for Lynx and customization,

• Download the zipped folder lynx_v283.zip from the link provided above.
• Extract the content and copy that into a new folder at the location C:/lynx_w32.
• Copy the file “Lynx.BAT” to your desktop and click that to start the browser
• Default page for Lynx is “Google”, if you want to change that to your blog or site then change the file lynx.cfg at the location C:/lynx_w32.
• To make the changes, find “http://www.google.com” in lynx.cfg and replace that by your blog’s or webpage URL. Save the changes and restart the browser from your desktop.

I am browsing Internet Techies on Lynx where you can see that the navigation or pages are appearing horizontally and then the rest of the data is appearing,

It is recommended by Google as well to have as much text as you can on your webpage. Try to avoid bulky flash videos, scripts or iframes to attract visitors. In that case, Googlebot will not able to recognize the content of that particular area.

Hope you liked the above post, Kindly provide your feedback and suggestions thru the comment section of this post.