About a month ago Google added a couple of Lab options to their Webmaster Tools collection – one of these allows you to see your site as the search engines do – or at least as Google does. This can be a handy tool if you are looking to fine tune your website SEO.

There are a lot of tools around that do the same job, however, you are relying on the tools creator to interpret how Google sees your site. Besides, why go to a second hand store when you can get brand new free? How does this help your SEO? In a number of ways.

If you are relatively new to SEO and web page design, you need to understand that what a search engine sees is not what a visitor sees. Search engines see the code that creates the page – visitors see the page that has been created and, hopefully, none of the code.

Although Google is not big on meta tags, it is still handy to see what the search engine sees. You can also see how close your content is to the top of the page and whether or not you have too much code at the top. Although not a big issue, you want your content as close to the top as possible. Here I am talking about the html code that Google is reading, not the printed page that visitors see.

If you are suspicious about any bad code being injected into your pages, you can use your browser’s ‘find’ option to search through your page. It is also handy for checking the placement on the page of keywords and key phrases.

Although only a lab trial, being able to see your pages as the search engines see it is a handy little addition to Google Webmaster Tools.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Search Engines. 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.