What do spiders see?

In the Kingdom of the blind the accessible site is king.

And the same thing goes for search engines too. Spiders (of the web variety) have no eyes with which to see. Your pretty pictures mean nothing to it and only lovingly crafted content, correctly structured, with sensible titles and alt tags make any sense to it.

So, how does your site look to the search engines I wonder? I plonked our very own new shiny site into the site and looked on with some interest at what came out. This is what the spiders see, no lovely graphics, swish typography, nope. Just simple words.

The old maxim “Google sees your site as a blind user does” is true and a good reason to stick to standards compliant design with valid HTML and CSS…

...and also a good point to use against those clients who don’t want to bother about accessibility. They might not care about blind users but the sure as hell WILL care about bad Google rankings.