What do spiders 'see'?

A search engine robot (or spider) is not at all the same thing as a browser like most people would use. It does not 'see' the page at all, but rather 'proceses' the raw source code of the pages instead.

Of course, this means that many of the things you might do to improve the accessibility of your website for blind or visually impaired users will also help the search engine spiders.

Search engine spiders are able to detect and process the information returned by the web servers, such as error messages, etc. Spiders are generally sensitive to things such as redirection or 'page forwarding'.

Because search engine spiders or robots are not the same thing as a browser, they generally do not have much (if any) support for frames. A spider will need the <NOFRAMES> HTML tags to provide it with content in a frameset page.

How do search engines index pages?

What can search engine spiders 'see'?

What makes pages rank more highly?

How do I optimise my web pages?

How much optimising will it need?

Is ranking based just on page content?