SEO is a buzzword everyone is using at the moment. Getting your sites referenced well in Google and other search engines provides a significant, long-term sustainable competitive advantage over your competitors.

But good, basic SEO techniques can be do more than just bring the right customers to your site:  Done right, it also lends itself well to improving accessibility and usability. - what search engines like, generally, users do to – and this is particularly relevant to those users with visual disabilities:

Here are just a few examples of how a search-engine friendly site can also be people friendly:

Logical site structure:

A straightforward, tree-like site structure is a winner in more ways than one – as well as giving Search bots an efficient route through your site’s content, it also enables your human visitors to find what they want logically and efficiently – result? More conversions and more repeat business.

HTML text instead of images

Ensuring all the important messages in your site are written in HTML, rather than part of an image - will enable search engines (including any internal site search function) to find and reference your copy, again helping your customers / readers find you.  But equally important, it means that customers using screen readers, or who have less than perfect vision will be able to read your site a lot more easily – and they buy things too!

Alt tags / Alt text

Again, a common fix for improving search engine referencing is to ensure that all images on your site carry alt:tags – again, enabling  crawlers to identify relevant content – but equally importantly enabling users who can’t see pictures to understand and navigate page content.

tags

As any SEO will tell you, Header tags are recognised by search engines as identifying key parts of text and are therefore highly influential in search results.  They also play the same role for screen readers, which usually ignore font size – enabling the visually impaired to quickly understand what’s what on  page.

Table-less content

Tables are a messy, outdated way of organising content in HTML – they’re a nice way of avoiding browser issues, but they’re code heavy, meaning all your optimised content gets lost amid a load of and tags. And as search engines and screen readers read from left to right, a load of tabular content can quickly become confusing to those not able to see it in defined rows and columns

To see how your site is read by a screen-reader, check out http://wave.webaim.org/ and see how much it makes sense!

Flash, JavaScript

I’m bound to upset some flash fans now, and I know that the newest versions of flash are getting better “friendlier” for search engines, but the fact remains that from a search and accessibility point of view, flash, AJAX, JavaScript et al are sub-optimal. Most flash and content isn’t referenced by search engines, all those swish moving graphics will be in vain if no-one can find you.

We’ve all seen how flash sites work on iPhones (err, they don’t) so imagine how a screen reader reacts when it comes across the same issue – it leaves visually impaired readers out in the cold.

The joy of writing an article like this is that you can guarantee that there’s an accessibility issue somewhere on this site now – I look forward to someone pointing it out!

For more on web accessibility and the latest internet standards, visit the W3C site at www.w3C.org

Tags: usability | accessibility | SEO