:: Where am I ?

If you have a magic related website, one of your on-going problems is constantly worrying over where your site ranks. ( If you're NOT worrying, you are either very smart, or very uninformed..)

Spannerworks Search Engine Marketing has a very nice selection of free tools to help you keep on top of your rank. My favorite is the Spider Simulator, which, in the words of Spannerworks...

The tool displays the content of the page, stripped of any HTML formatting tags. It will ignore images and any JavaScript-generated text.

All search engine friendly links on the page are listed - a spider will follow each of these to crawl the rest of your site. Click on these links to use the tool to crawl further into the site. The tool will also follow server-side redirects.

If the spider’s eye view does not display anything for a page, then the HTTP viewer may shed light onto where the problem lies.

If you use a site builder as I do, you have to be concerned about the readability of some of your content. In Dreamweaver, Sitespinner, and Frontpage site builders in particular, you have content being generated as code instead of text. Not always.. but often enough that you have to wonder what the spiders actually 'see' when they visit your site..

Spider Simulator strips your webpage of all code, JavaScript, and images - and displays ONLY what the spider would see. This not only offers you peace of mind that your content is being properly indexed when your site is spidered, but it reveals any text that, for whatever reason, is not being indexed because it's invisible to these itsy bitsy spiders....

You can also access a simple-to-use search engine position checker to help you quickly determine how your site stacks up against your competition. I can enter a term such as 'street magic' and discover quickly how my sites, in this case StreetMagic.info, fares against other sites like ellusionist or Penguin.

In the SE I chose for comparison (one of the five principle search engines) my site was #4, ellusionist #5, and Penguin #8. In yet another SE, my site was not in the top twenty.

Now I know where I need to focus some attention this week..

Hey.. I never said this stuff was interesting. But it IS critical - if you have any hope of succeeding on the web.

Got Questions?