Search Engine Optimization : Part 1 : Accessibility

Too often, web designers view search engine optimization (SEO) as an after thought; they pass it off to Marketing or IT responsibilities leaving their role to user experience, aesthetic design, and navigation. In some cases, they have good reason as search engine optimizers often pollute search engine results with spam, making it harder to find relevant information when searching.

I’d like to introduce a 10 part series dedicated to SEO with each post focused on a specific task. Most search optimization articles summarize SEO or list the variety of things to do; let’s instead get detailed about each initiative giving you, my readers, much needed detail to accomplish each task.

Inform those web designers that SEO is about accessibility. All of their effort is for naught if customers, readers, and users can’t find the site. The better part of your attention to search engine optimization will result in your site being indexed, catalogued, and published to users through the search engines (where, incidentally, 80% of everyone online turns to find things). Simply put, you are going to minimize JavaScript and streamline code allowing search engines to more easily spider, index, and rank web pages.

Think of a search engine as a barebones web browser that only reads content. It can’t see the pretty pictures or exciting flash and can’t interpret JavaScript or applets. If you walk away with one nugget of information from this post – search engines ONLY READ TEXT:

• If your site is in flash, you don’t exist
• If your site uses JavaScript navigation, the engine can’t find anything past the homepage
• If you use images (buttons) to direct people, understand that text in an image is not the same as text on a page, engines don’t read it

Before this gets long winded, let’s get to the point with Paul’s 3 rules for site accessibility. Only 3 you say? Yes, there are more, but these are the big ones which you need to pay attention to now.

1. URL structureThere are two sub-topics here. Optimization and organization; all that matters is that you want to ensure your web page addresses are straightforward, memorable, and use common language. First, organization (since we’re here to talk about accessibility)

   Organization – Engines can’t read parameters. What are parameters? Look at your url and tell me if it has folders website.com/category/subcategory/group/page.html or a string of nonsense like this website.com/webapp/shopping?param1212&wefw1&category&productcodes1234

   Now, tell the person next to you to stop laughing at you for talking to your computer monitor.

   Search engines can’t read parameters so if you have the second structure, the engine stops indexing pages at website.com. (OK experts, YES, some search engines can read and index parameters and yes we can debate to what degree or how many are allowed… I’m not talking to you… we’re simplifying here).

   Go to wikipedia and look up mod rewrite (or mod-rewrite, url rewrite, or rewrite engine, I don’t recall how they name it now). You need to prioritize your IT resources to do this now. A mod rewrite which change the parameter based nonsense to a straightforward folder based URL. When that’s done, not only can engines index your content but its easier for your friends to link to the site, neighbors to bookmark pages, and enemies to remember the address of their favorite content on your site.

   Optimization – I’ll get into this more in another of the 10 topics, for now, just consider that you want the url to feature popular keywords. There’s some debate as to the effectiveness of having these keywords in your URL (improving your position); don’t worry about whether or it helps, think like a user, if you are searching for BMW are you not more likely to click on a result that has BMW in the URL?

2. Sitemaps

   Don’t have a sitemap? What are you waiting for? At the very least enable Google’s sitemap generator and get one going. If you have more time, create a public sitemap that links to ALL pages in your site. Yes, all of them. I’ve worked for a few companies that want a sitemap limited to the content to which they want to send people. A sitemap is not for users, sure, some will use it and those that do probably want it to be comprehensive, its for search engines to find EVERYTHING so that when Joe Blow is searching for that obscure article that you don’t really want to actively promote, he can find it, through Google (or Yahoo).

   Know that conventional wisdom suggests sitemaps are no good beyond 100 pages. Search engines will only crawl about 100 links on a page. Again, we can debate that (or exactly how many links) but I say go with the wisdom of the masses and optimize accordingly. Limit a primary sitemap to 100 links and have some of those links go to other sitemaps with more specific content. For example, have your primary sitemap link to all the main category pages and a sitemap about the content in that category. Keep repeating until you map all your pages.

3. Navigation and user experienceThis is more of a list. No way around it. Essentially, I’m going to run down a list of scripts, codes, and different technical things of which you want to be aware. I’m assuming most of you have to turn to engineers, web designers, programmers, or your son/daughter to make these changes to your site so I thought it best just to give you some do’s and don’ts

   – Keep navigation simple and use popular words as the names for links and static links to redirect the traffic – If you use an image map rather than a text-based menu as the primary navigational method, a redundant text-only menu somewhere on the same page is a must. You may not like having to duplicate the navigation or put redundant content on the page but remember, if a search engine can’t index your site, no one else can so who cares how nice your image map looks. – Don’t use javascript. Unless you MUST but NEVER for navigation. Test this by ensuring that pages work when scripts, applets, or other programmed objects are turned off – Use 301 redirects. I like to keep this simple. If you move a page, set up a 301 redirect from the old location to the new. You’ll find there are a handful of redirect types (304, 302, etc.) you really just want to know and use 301 (if unsure, check them all out). Do NOT use html redirects or code them onto the page or in the header. If you move content, set up a 301. – Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links – When you use images, use Alt-text (this is good for the blind as well as search engines) – Which reminds, me, search engines are also deaf, they can’t hear anything you play so make sure you have text descriptions on the page where that content plays – Finally, use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Your site is now accessible. Go ahead, post it so I can check it out and feel free to ask me any questions. Coming up, we’ll get into detail about title tags, page copy, alt-text, meta content, and much more as we go into detail about SEO.