How Do Search Engines Like Google See Your Blog

Search engine bots see your blog or website differently than most of your normal users. The bot is looking for specific things, and comparing different data to determine what you page is about, and how useful it actually is. There are a few tools you can use that will emulate what Google and other search engines actually see when they look at your blog, and this can help you optimize your site and learn what Google is indexing when the bot visits your site.
When a search engine first visits your site it records all the data avaliable. This includes your title tags, meta data, your image description tags, and your main body of content. It then compares all this data together to figure out what you are talking about, and if all the data matches to determine if you are a legitimate page (so if your title says cell phones, and then you just list a bunch of cities, you obiously have nothing of value to offer about cell phones).
But search engines are made to index all types of content. They not only look at the description you include with a image, they also look at the text around that image, the name of that image, and even the size of the image to figure out what that image is all about. Flash on your website can be read by search engines now, and some bots even click every possible clickable thing on your flash movie just to get to all the information inside.
When a search engine puts together the “universal” search results, it looks to its video database, its image database, the products database, and organic text results to provide the user a wide selection. Even the discussion of your content on another website can change how the search engine handles your results.
So, besides guessing how Google will see your site, how can we get a better look of this unseen side of the web?
WEB SNIFFER
Web Sniffer is a bot you can send to your site which will report what it sees back to you. This is a great way to get a basic idea of the structure of your site, what content is read first by the search engine bots, and to see what the search engines sees.
Find it at http://web-sniffer.net/
GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS

Google actually provides this information in a stripped down, no giving away of secrets type of way with their Google webmaster tools. All you need is a Google account, and a little bit of time, and you can find out all kinds of stuff that Google knows about your website.
You can find the Google Webmaster Tools at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Using those tools and a bit of common sense can really help your blog target those coveted keywords. I tried to find something that would give insight on how search engines see things like video and flash, but I couldn’t find anything concret. Maybe a good idea for the next Top Blogger tool.
I did find a official Google article about “Video Sitemaps,” which is very interesting and provides a little insight on optimizing your video content.
Do you know of any other tools that allow you to look at your website the way Googlebot sees your blog? Submit it today via a comment below! Thanks for reading and happy blogging.