Accessibility
An accessible site is one that ensures delivery of its content successfully as often as possible. The functionality of pages, validity of HTML elements, uptime of the site’s server, and working status of site coding and components all figure into site accessibility. If these features are ignored or faulty, both search engines and users will select other sites to visit.
The biggest problems in accessibility that most sites encounter fit into the following categories. Addressing these issues satisfactorily will avoid problems getting search engines and visitors to and through your site.
Broken Links - If an HTML link is broken, the contents of the linked-to page may never be found. In addition, some surmise that search engines negatively degrade rankings on sites & pages with many broken links.
Valid HTML & CSS - Although arguments exist about the necessity for full validation of HTML and CSS in accordance with W3C guidelines, it is generally agreed that code must meet minimum requirements of functionality and successful display in order to be spidered and cached properly by the search engines.
Functionality of Forms and Applications - If form submissions, select boxes, javascript, or other input-required elements block content from being reached via direct hyperlinks, search engines may never find them. Keep data that you want accessible to search engines on pages that can be directly accessed via a link. In a similar vein, the successful functionality and implementation of any of these pieces is critical to a site’s accessibility for visitors. A non-functioning page, form, or code element is unlikely to receive much attention from visitors.
File Size - With the exception of a select few documents that search engines consider to be of exceptional importance, web pages greater than 150K in size are typically not fully cached. This is done to reduce index size, bandwidth, and load on the servers, and is important to anyone building pages with exceptionally large amounts of content. If it’s important that every word and phrase be spidered and indexed, keeping file size under 150K is highly recommended. As with any online endeavor, smaller file size also means faster download speed for users - a worthy metric in its own right.
Server Speed - The performance of your site’s server may have an adverse impact on search rankings and visitors if downtime and slow transfer speeds are common. Invest in high quality hosting to prevent this issue.
URLs, Title Tags & Meta Data
URLs, title tags and meta tag components are all information that describe your site and page to visitors and search engines. Keeping them relevant, compelling and accurate are key to ranking well. You can also use these areas as launching points for your keywords, and indeed, successful rankings require their use.
The URL of a document should ideally be as descriptive and brief as possible. If, for example, your site’s structure has several levels of files and navigation, the URL should reflect this with folders and subfolders. Individual pages’ URLs should also be descriptive without being overly lengthy, so that a visitor who sees only the URL could have a good idea of what to expect on the page.
Title tags, in addition to their invaluable use in targeting keyword terms for rankings, also help drive click-through-rates from the results pages. Most of the search engines will use a page’s title tag as the blue link text and headline for a result , and thus it is important to make them informative and compelling without being overly “salesy”. The best title tags will make the targeted keywords prominent, help brand the site, and be as clear and concise as possible.
Meta Tag Recommendations:
Meta tags once held the distinction of being the primary realm of SEO specialists. Today, the use of meta tags, particularly the meta keywords tag, has diminished to an extent that search engines no longer use them in their ranking of pages. However, the meta description tag can still be of some importance, as several search engines use this tag to display the snippet of text below the clickable title link in the results pages.
In the image to the left, an illustration of a Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) shows the use of the meta description and title tags. It is on this page that searchers generally make their decision as to which result to click, and thus, while the meta description tag may have little to no impact on where a page ranks, it can significantly impact the # of visitors the page receives from search engine traffic. Note that meta tags are NOT always used on the SERPs, but can be seen (at the discretion of the search engine) if the description is accurate, well-written, and relevant to the searcher’s query.
Search-Friendly Text
Making the visible text on a page “search-friendly” isn’t complicated, but it is an issue that many sites struggle with. Text styles that cannot be indexed by search engines include:
* Text embedded in a Java Application or Macromedia Flash file
* Text in an image file - jpg, gif, png, etc
* Text accessible only via a form submit or other on-page action
If the search engines can’t see your page’s text, they cannot spider and index that content for visitors to find. Thus, making search-friendly text in HTML format is critical to ranking well and getting properly indexed. If you are forced to use a format that hides text from search engines, try to use the right keywords and phrases in headlines, title tags, URLs, and image/file names on the page. Don’t go overboard with this tactic, and never try to hide text. Even if the search engines can’t detect this automatically, a competitor can easily report your site for spamming and have you de-listed entirely.
Along with making text visible, it’s important to remember that search engines measure the terms and phrases in a document to extract a great deal of information about the page. Writing well for search engines is both an art and a science and one that can be harnessed to achieve better rankings.
Make Use of a Sitemap - It’s wise to have the sitemap page linked to from every other page in the site, or at the least from important high-level category pages and the home page. The sitemap should, ideally, offer links to all of the site’s internal pages. However, if more than 100-150 pages exist on the site, a wiser system is to create a sitemap that will link to all of the category level pages, so that no page in a site is more than 2 clicks from the home page. For exceptionally large sites, this rule can be expanded to 3 clicks from the home page.