Seekport’s seekbot

A new award-winning UK-centric search engine is offering website owners a free tool to check their site’s search engine-friendliness.

Seekport’s seekbot is a cut down version of its own crawler and has been developed to “help web masters check and adapt their web pages to ensure they are built to a good standard for search engines.”

Being search engine-friendly is an important plank in the business of achieving a good ranking in search engine results – a key tool for getting customers to beat a path to your door. In conjunction with relevance, context and good quality content, search engine-friendliness is the foundation upon which all the other elements are built. Without being optimised for indexing, it is unlikely a site would ever find itself in the first page of results by anything other than accident.

To gain an overview of a site’s search engine sociability, enter the URL of the page in seekbot and in one click users are presented with an easy-to-read run down that is a search engine spider’s eyeview of the page.

Seekbot analyses the source code of the selected web page for all the elements that are important to search engines such as keywords and other meta data. The more pluses you score for an element the more important that element is on your web page. The quality of the element itself is not evaluated however.

Each score is accompanied by a link to more information on its significance. What you don’t want to see are lots of minuses. Very usefully, there are links on the report page to enable it to be emailed or printed out for future reference.

We have discussed search engine spiders before, but it’s always helpful to retrace our steps sometimes to ensure we’ve grasped the concept correctly.

Search engines deploy small software applications variously called spiders, crawlers or bots, the latter being short for robots. The spiders are sent out to trawl the net on information gathering duties checking existing and new sites.

They are drones that browse the web following links, analysing the page, then moving on to the next link. The analysis of each page is then reported back to HQ and feeds into the indexing process that determines page ranking and a site’s placing in search results in relation to specific keywords.

A search engine’s Artificial Intelligence does not view a web page in the same way as a human though. It does not think to itself, “Ooh, that’s a pretty looking page, I like that.” It takes more of a Vulcan approach, applying cold logic to the underlying source code for its visual clues and assessment.

Expains Seekport: “Crawlers analyse all text elements of your web page. This may sound trivial, but can become a serious problem if the text of a web page contains little or no content. i.e. A ‘welcome’ page, greeting picture or just ‘click here’. Crawlers are unable to read pictures or any text that is contained in the pictures. The same applies to Flash animations. Therefore the Crawler ignores this content. The crawler identifies links using the a-element and the 'href=' attribute.”

Launched in the UK in late December, 2004, Seekport earlier this month won the “Innovation Area Award” in the category of fastest market entry at the CeBIT 2005 computer fair. The high-calibre judging panel included representatives of IBM, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Ernst & Young and the Fraunhofer Institut SIT.

Seekport is a European company established in Germany in 2003. It specialises in country-specific search engines and operates in the UK, France and Germany, with roll outs in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe planned for later in 2005.

Seekport says it differentiates itself from US-centric search engines by operating country-specific indexing teams to produce high quality results that filter out junk results.