Design and SEO

Do you know that robots are blind?

Yes, we might like to think we live in a technologically very advanced world. However this is far from true.

If you watch carefully, with the eyes of a scientist, a SiFi movie made during the 70ties or 80ties of the passed century, you will most certainly notice a lot of futuristic gadgets, which today we have as ordinary and everyday devices. Take for example the Star Trek TV series from the 80ties, everybody is walking around with 'iPads' and on every desk there is a 'laptop', which at that time did not exist, except in the minds of the SiFi writers. Now look what other innovations are there in the movie we have yet to discover ...

Yes, robots can record or transmit a video, take a picture, but when they try to analyze what they see, well, they are still very stupid. May be robots can distinguish fingerprints or faces and compare to a database with accuracy we humans can only envy, however when it comes to telling what is going on, to analyzing processes and taking decisions based on what they see, robots are blind. And so are the Search Engines. SEs see and use for indexing only the words in a website (and links between sites), they do not see at all what is on the images and videos. On the other hand the internet is becoming more and more a visual media, compared to what it was in the beginning - a text media.

No wonder there are plenty of companies, big and small, that try to fill that gap. And the company that finds an algorithm to generate relevant keywords from images or videos will no doubt be the next huge thing disrupting deeply the SEs ... and the way robots think.

But for now we, the SEO experts, will have to find ways to apply good design and optimize texts for keywords.