SEO Made Accessible
"The site isn't going to do anyone any good if the visitor – human or search engine spider alike - can't get past the front door."
As with Web Accessibility, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works best when it’s thought of at the beginning of the design process, not after the site has gone up. If a site is going to rank well, it’s because it was designed to. Keywords should be chosen at the same time the content is being written. Page titles, descriptions, and keywords should be written at the same time the pages are created. For the coding of the site it is important to use valid code without unnecessary Flash or JavaScript that make indexing the site difficult, if not impossible.
This doesn’t mean that older sites can’t be optimized; just that it becomes exponentially harder to do the older the code is. The solution to this is to update the code as best as possible. Make sure there are no depreciated tags within the code. Pull any embedded and inline CSS out of the .html file and put it into an external .css file. Pull any JavaScript functions out of the .html and into an external .js file. Replace JavaScript navigation menus with CSS menus. Images should have descriptive alt text – especially if those images are part of the navigation or if the site’s header is an image. And finally add content to the site – the more text there is on the page the more there is for search engine crawlers to see.
Once the site is updated it’s time to do keyword research and update the title, description and keyword tags – and to do it correctly. Take the time to do extensive research on what keywords will work best for the site. When creating titles, descriptions and keywords make them relevant to each page. Don’t use a keyword on every individual page just for the sake of having it on a page. If the keyword is not used within the content don’t use it in the title, description or keyword tag.
Final step in SEO should be inbound linking – and in fact shouldn’t be considered until after all other updates to the code are completed. Yes, it’s true that inbound linking is probably the single most important part of SEO, but visitors still need to be able to use the site once they get to it. Rankings are all well and good but are pretty much worthless if the visitor can’t use the site. Make sure the site is usable before inviting visitors to see it. The site isn’t going to do anyone any good if the visitor – human or search engine spider alike – can’t get past the front door.
