Cater for the blind, cater for Google

I'm sure every web developer who's worked on a public facing site, frequently hears about SEO.

SEO entails doing everything you can as a developer of a site to get its Google page ranking up and also allow Google to getter a better "understanding" of the web sites content and how it relates to user's searches.

Something that regularly gets overlooked during development, is that you are guaranteed to have at least one blind user frequenting your site, Google, even though SEO is one of the most important aspects of modern site development.

Google is effectively a blind user. It has no concept of how things are displayed on your web site, just what it can find and "understand" in your page markup, similar to screen reader technology. Understanding this, is the first step in understanding how to improve to your sites Google ranking.

Making web sites more accessible to the blind has always been one of the great strengths of CSS based layouts, keeping your page markup clean and all the layout fuss in seperate files. By following the basic rules of CSS based layouts, you've already taken great steps in improving both the SEO and accessibility of your site.

This is not to say that table based layouts cannot be made accessable to the blind without putting in some additional effort, its just something you get "out of the box" by following CSS layout guidelines.

In conclusion

By employing best practices, proper use of HTML tags,CSS for layout and ensuring screen readers can parse the markup on site correctly, you improve the accessibility of your site and directly improve Google's "understanding" of your site.