Accessibility And SEO

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.

sourece:http://www.phoenixrealm.com/accessibility-and-seo/

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.

Conclusion: Implementing an SEO Strategy

The process of SEO is not easy to tackle, largely because so many pieces of a site factor into the final results. Promoting a site that writers on the web are unlikely to link to is as deadly as creating a fantastic website no one will see. SEO is also a long-term process, both in application and results – those who expect quick rankings after completing a few suggestions in this guide will be deeply dissapointed. Search engines can often be frustratingly slow to respond to improvements that will eventually garner significant boosts in traffic.

Patience is not the only virtue that should be used for successful SEO. The strategy itself must have a strong foundation in order to succeed. The best site’s adhere strictly to these guidelines:

1. Unique Content – Something that has never before been offered on the web in terms of depth, quality or presentation (i.e. a unique value proposition)
2. Access to an Adoptive Community – Connections or alliances with people/websites in an existing online community that is ready to accept, visit and promote your offering
3. Link-Friendly Formatting – Even the best content may be unlikely to be linked to if it displays ads, particularly those that break up the page content or pop-up when a visitor comes to the site. Use discretion in presenting your material and remember that links are one of the most valuable commodities a site/page can get and they’ll last far longer than a pop-up ad’s revenue.
4. Monetization Plan – Intelligent systems for monetizing powerful content must exist, or bandwidth, hosting and development costs will eventually overrun your budget.
5. Market Awareness – If your site is targeting highly competitive terms you should make available, an online marketing budget, including funds for link buying, and hire or consult with someone experienced in bringing newer sites to the top of the SERPs.

If you take these steps and have a robust knowledge of the methods described in this guide, you are ready to begin an SEO campaign.

Keywords and Queries

Search engines rely on the terms queried by users to determine which results to put through their algorithms, order and return to the user. But, rather than simply recognizing and retrieving exact matches for query terms, search engines use their knowledge of semantics (the science of language) to construct intelligent matching for queries. An example might be a search for loan providers that also returned results that did not contain that specific phrase, but instead had the term lenders.

The engines collect data based on the frequency of use of terms and the co-occurrence of words and phrases throughout the web. If certain terms or phrases are often found together on pages or sites, search engines can construct intelligent theories about their relationships. Mining semantic data through the incredible corpus that is the Internet has given search engines some of the most accurate data about word ontologies and the connections between words ever assembled artificially. This immense knowledge of language and its usage gives them the ability to determine which pages in a site are topically related, what the topic of a page or site is, how the link structure of the web divides into topical communties and much, much more.

Search engines’ growing artificial intelligence on the subject of language means that queries will increasingly return more intelligent, evolved results. This heavy investment in the field of natural language processing (NLP) will help to achieve greater understanding of the meaning and intent behind their users’ queries. Over the long term, users can expect the results of this work to produce increased relevancy in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and more accurate guesses from the engines as to the intent of a user’s queries.

Reference: http://www.seomoz.org

What is SEO and Why does website need SEO

What is SEO?

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some havea highly specialized focus while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization (since so many of those elements intertwine).

This guide is designed to describe all areas of SEO – from discovery of the terms and phrases that will generate traffic, to making a site search engine friendly to building the links and marketing the unique value of the site/organization’s offerings.

Why does my company/organization/website need SEO?

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines – Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves (although AOL gets nearly 10% of searches, their engine is powered by Google’s results). If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search – people who want what you have visiting your site. Whether your site provides content, services, products or information, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users.

Search queries, the words that users type into the search box which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search engine traffic can make (or break) an organization’s success. Targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue and exposure like no other. Investing in SEO, whether through time or finances, can have an exceptional rate of return.

Why can’t the search engines figure out my site without SEO help?

Search engines are always working towards improving their technology to crawl the web more deeply and return increasingly relevant results to users. However, there is and will always be a limit to how search engines can operate. Whereas the right moves can net you thousands of visitors and attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO can also help boost rankings, so that content that has been found will be placed where searchers will more readily see it. The online environment is becoming increasingly competitive and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.

How much of this article do I need to read?

If you are serious about improving search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, I recommend reading this guide front-to-back. There’s a printable MS Word version for those who’d prefer, and dozens of linked-to resources on other sites and pages that are worthy of your attention. Although this guide is long, I’ve attempted to remain faithful to Mr. Strunk’s famous quote:

“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.“

Every section and topic in this report is critical to understand

Soure: http://www.seomoz.org/