So you’ve created a great design, you’ve built the site and you’ve written and added the content. Everything’s looking good — or is it?
Sometimes it helps to step back from the design and see the site as a search engine will see and index it. This is where the Lynx browser can be very helpful. Basically Lynx is a cross-platform text-based browser that runs in the command line. Originally it was developed for UNIX but DOS versions are also available that run under all versions of Windows.
First of all you will need to install Lynx. The Lynx project is hosted at http://lynx.isc.org, however you can download a packaged version for Mac from Softpedia: http://mac.softpedia.com/progDownload/Lynx-Download-7825.html (at the time of writing the latest version is 2.8.7).
After installing the Lynx Browser, open Terminal.app and enter the command: lynx
The browser will then open in the terminal window. From here type: g (for go), then enter and you will be prompted for a URL. Simply enter the URL you wish to view.
It’s always a good idea to check your page with all images/javascript etc. turned off. Read it through, is it as you expected? Does it get the message across that you want? Does the content appear in the order that you were expecting? If the answer to any of these questions is no, maybe you need to re-think your content and/or structure.