Mastering Lynx (Open Source Text Browser) for Search Engine Optimization
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Is there still a use for a browser so old that it can't display images, let alone video? As a matter of fact, there is. The Lynx browser displays web pages in very much the same way a search engine spider would see them. How you can use this knowledge to help optimize your site for the search engines is the subject of this two-part article series.
One of the most important objectives in search engine optimization is to ensure that the text content as intended to be shown to the readers is the same as seen by search engine bots. When search engine bots crawl text content which is not seen by normal visitors, this comprises what is called “hidden text.” At the opposite end, when search engine bots cannot read text that is seen normally by visitors, this introduces crawling issues.
At worst, you discover that search engine bots are not picking up your text content after all, which you never would have thought was happening, since your website looks very good to visitors. This is where using advanced tools to check “website crawlability” are important as part of the website design process and during the execution of onsite search engine optimization improvement.
One of the best of these tools is the Lynx browser. This is a text browser as opposed to normal browsers that read HTML, images and coded content. A text browser will display purely text and indexable text-based hyperlinks very similar to what search engine crawlers can see (such as Google bots). In fact, this text browser is recommended by Google to diagnose text crawling/search engine crawling issues.
You can read what Google has to say about hidden text. Likewise, if you're looking for information on using Lynx, Google provides some technical guidelines. And if you're still not convinced, you might want to check out a Google Webmaster blog entry on how spiders view the web.
As mentioned above, this is a two-part tutorial series on mastering the use of Lynx for search engine optimization. The first part discusses the installation, techniques and important features of Lynx. The second part will discuss the detailed interpretation of text content/crawling issues and troubleshooting using the text browser.
Using Lynx will ensure that your site is within search quality and technical guidelines for search engine spiders. If you are ready, let’s get started.
Next: Lynx Installation and Preparation >>
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