Software Technology Tips

Lynx was one of the earliest Web browsers, in fact, for a period of time it was the only popular hypertext browser available. Initially it was mean't for UNIX, VMS only but gradually it was ported to Linux, DOS and finally Windows. It is a text-only browser, so when newer browsers supporting images arrived, Lynx lost much of its popularity.

However, Lynx still remains as one of the best tools for any need that requires webmasters to see how their webpages look in text mode including search engine optimization. Lynx is an important SEO tool since it allows the webmaster to view the website exactly as the search engine crawlers and bots do.

Lynx is a free and open source project which can be downloaded from http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/pub/ or any mirror sites  But if you don't want to download it, you can still use it as an online tool. All you have to do is visit Lynx viewer and enter the URL address of the site you want to analyze.I tried browsing http:///www.mindfiresolutions.com from the online Lynx Viewer,here is the first few lines

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   [1]Home  |  [2]Faq  |  [3]Site map  |  [4]Contact
   [5]Email sales@ or Call 1-248-686-1424
   banner
   275+ people at 2 centers in India
   100+ clients in the US and Europe
   15+ clients rescued from off-shore failure
   ISO 9001:2000 certified
   Microsoft Gold Certified Partner

Note: Please remember that its a text-based browser which doesn't support javascript or flash, making it a terribly boring browsing experience but it allows you to see your website exactly as the crawlers and bots do. So if you are into optimization, you are going to end up using Lynx (any text-based browser should do but I haven't heard of many Lynx variants ) anyway. Please refer is what Google webmaster guidelines says about Lynx in the "technical guidelines" section.