In today’s SEO training session #2, we talk about how to scrape a website for content and why it’s important to know what a spider sees when it crawls your page.

Knowing what the spider sees when it encounters your web pages is critical.  Following are simple steps for determining exactly what the spider sees upon encountering your pages.

1. Go to the page you want to scrape.

2. Select all by pressing Ctl A, copy the selection into a buffer with a Ctl C.

3. Open a text editor such as word pad – not a word processor.

4. Copy contents into the text editor by pressing Ctl V.

5. Review what you see.6. Will the content in the text editor convey to the spider what the page is all about?

Here is what the spider sees when it visits CastleWave.com.  Italics and highlighting added.  “CastleWave LLC

Home

About Us

Email Us

 * Link Building   

* Customer Acquisition         

o Search               

+ Pay Per Click               

+ Viral Search Traffic         

o Affiliate Marketing         

 o Online to Offline Marketing   

* Strategic Web Consulting   

* SEO   

* Software Engineer Outsource   

* Content Creation

Home

Link Building   

Link building can be a laborious task…but it is critical to the long term success of your web site. You need link juice! Why? Links are crucial when it comes to building page rank.    more…

Customer Acquisition   

Want more customers? Our viral marketing strategies can help. CastleWave uses automated tools to discover the relevant sites for link building which speeds up the process of sending link requests to the other websites.    more…

Strategic Web Consulting   

CastleWave is dedicated to helping you achieve your web presence goals. From your initial creative ideas to converting users into loyal customers, we can help.    more…

Search Engine Optimization and more – CastleWave…   

was created to satisfy the need of serious web site owners to drive traffic to their sites. We understand the power of relevant, fresh content on your site and how to get customers to it

Search Engine Optimization!

You want search engines to find and feast on your site. Content is king but you better understand the importance of link building, how to structure your pages to accommodate search engines, and key html elements. Just because you have your page up doesn’t mean search engines will find it and know what it’s all about. 

 Content Creation!

Because content is so important you need to know how and where to use it. We build landing page content, blog, articles, product AdCopy and more.

We write content that will optimize and ensure effective execution to convert traffic into customers who are looking for your products. We do this for, Pay Per Click advertisements, blogs and other word related services that allow you to get your message to customers.

Link Juice!

Links help drive traffic but not just any link will do. You need the right kind of links.

Our insightful team understands how to build your link power. CastleWave will only participate in “white hat” linking practices and we employ automated tools to determine relevant sites for link building.

Customer Acquisition!

Want more customers? Our viral marketing strategies can help.

Software Engineer Outsource!

Now that you have the idea in your head, how do you make it a reality on the web? How do you create the application that will show the world your idea? Let us show you how!

Endorsement of our software development outsource program is evident by the fact that several of our Software Engineers are contracted to high visibility customers helping them achieve strategic technology objectives. These engineers work on a contract basis assisting clients build simple to complex software applications and design compelling web sites…”

That’s ABOUT 500 words.  Does the above content give the spider the clues it needs to know what this site is all about?

One of the common mistakes site designer’s make is allowing menu structures to get in the way of content.  Keep in mind that spiders will only crawl through approximately the first 250-500 words on a page.  It is critical that your key message be clearly identifiable within this range.  Content is king, not menus, not flash, not images.

Now you can scrape your website to see how well it holds up to a spider’s examination.

Tags: Content, page scrapes, SEO, spider

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Content is King. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.