published by Gary in Accessibility
Are you aware that if your website is accessible it is also search engine friendly? By “accessible” I don’t mean that your website should be hosted on a server and it should be accessible to all your visitors, I mean that is assumed, right? Accessibility regarding websites means that your website is accessible to people of all abilities and this means that visually as well as physically challenged people should also be able to access your website and if they’re not able to access your website that means that your website is not accessible no matter if you get hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Aside from the government regulations, if you incorporate accessibility features into your website you make your website search engine friendly; this is because basically the search engine crawlers go through your website as if a browser for the visually challenged would access its contents.
But what constitutes an inaccessible website? An inaccessible website does not have a clearly defined navigation system. It is full of images and flash animations and other needless stuff. Now if you have a website that primarily deals with videos and images then you cannot help it but if you are having videos and images just as bells and whistles then you are needlessly making your website inaccessible to a big part of population who could have used your website to do business with you.
If you think that people who have visual or physical impairments anyway are not going to be your customers or clients then you are living away from reality because on the Internet you never know if 30% of your visitors have visual or physical limitations. Anyway this is not the main point of this post; the main point is that by making your website accessible you make it search engine friendly because the search engines like accessible websites and they don’t like inaccessible websites. Simple.
So how does your website become searching and friendly when you make it accessible?
- With all the images you use the ALT text so that the browsers of the visually impaired surfers can make out what is there in the image.
- You use the keywords in the hyperlinks. This tells people where the links are leading to.
- Less use of JavaScript and flash animation. This way you remove from the website things that cannot be detected by the browsers for the visually impaired.
- You have a sitemap at the top; this means all your links are immediately accessible with just a few clicks or tabs.
- A meaningful page title means people with visual impairment can immediately make out what’s the page about because the title of your page is the first thing their browser reads.
- Since the visually impaired can quickly scan through your web pages by tabbing to your headings and subheadings it makes perfect sense to clearly define them.
- If you use CSS to create your layout it means that without the layout your text and the navigation bar appears in a linear fashion and this means it can be easily accessible to all browsers.
Hence you can easily make out that if you follow the accessibility guidelines you also end up making your website search engine friendly.
Popularity: 34%
published by Gary in Website Design
Slashdot:
An anonymous reader writes “Web developers increasingly grow weary of having to put so much effort into designing their sites according to the whims of the Google search engine. When the most important thing is ‘getting indexed’ it is increasingly difficult for web site designers to offer the simple, uncluttered user experience they’d like to. [...]
Popularity: 31%
Continue reading “What if Google Had to Design For Google?”
published by Gary in Website Design
Are you still using tables to create your layouts?
Well if you are there is nothing earth shattering about it, it’s just that by creating DIV-based, tableless layouts you not only create a web site with less source code, you also make it W3C compatible (The W3C guidelines recommend tableless layouts).
Why table based layouts after all?
Web [...]
Popularity: 34%
Continue reading “Advantages Of Using Tableless Layouts”
published by Gary in Social Media
Late last week I noticed an increase in website traffic, instead of averaging 600 for a couple of days unique visitors were hitting high 800’s.
Curious as to what had caused this jump, I investigated further.
Stumbleupon.com was passing me around 3 times the traffic that Google was, nice!!
Why??
I have a post regarding questions an SEO [...]
Popularity: 28%
Continue reading “The power of Stumbleupon”
published by Gary in SEO
On Sunday this week I noticed that Phoenixrealm had reduced from PR6 to PR5, strange as I was not aware of a general Google PR update.
Lots of posts have been written on this subject this week here is a paid link debate roundup.
Some believe that this is purely a Google glitch, but the majority believe [...]
Popularity: 23%
Continue reading “Google Penalty ?”
published by Gary in SEO Tips
I have published a fairly extensive 20 tip article with 10 SEO do’s and 10 SEO don’ts. It is intended as a handout for local marketing seminars and or as a general information article to send to new SEO enquiries..
Popularity: 23%
Popularity: 23%
Continue reading “10 SEO do’s and 10 SEO don’ts Article”
published by Gary in Pay-Per-Click | SEO
Although there are thousands of ways you can promote your business online, two well-known methods are search engine optimisation and paid advertising. Paid advertising can be done in the form of PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns like Google Ads or paying other webmasters and bloggers to display your link on their websites and blogs with your chosen [...]
Popularity: 36%
Continue reading “Why SEO Is Better Than Paid Search Engine Marketing”
published by Gary in Blogging | SEO
Blogs are a rage these days not just because they help you publish and share your thoughts and then obtain instant reactions from your readers, they are a great SEO tool too.
Blogs are favorite among search engines because one, they are highly focused and hence highly relevant to the expression being searched for, and two, [...]
Popularity: 26%
Continue reading “Using Your Blog For SEO”
published by Gary in On Page SEO
Does it matter how long or short your web pages and blog posts are vis-à-vis your search engine rankings? Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t: it depends on your competition. I have seen blank web pages — with just the title carrying the expression searched for — appearing at the first spot on Google, [...]
Popularity: 36%
Continue reading “Does Page Length Matter?”
published by Gary in SEO
Wearing my Doublespark SEO hat, I recently gave a joint SEO presentation to the Chartered Institute of Marketing, along with partner companies Titman Firth and Peterborough Copyrighting Bureau.
The seminar centered around how small to medium sized businesses can increase profitability by attracting targeted traffic to their sites. The goal was to pass on the knowledge [...]
Popularity: 17%
Continue reading “SEO Seminar”
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