SEO through Accessibility- How designing accessible websites leads to automatic SEO

SEO through Accessibility- How designing accessible websites leads to automatic SEO By Abhay Rautela ConeTrees.com , UXQuotes.com , TheUXBookmark.com , @conetrees

Agenda
An overview on SEO
An overview on Web Accessibility
Where SEO and Accessibility overlap
WCAG 2.0 guideline implementation overlapping with SEO
Accessibility Implementation
Q n A
Feedback

An overview on SEO
Brief
Benefits
Major search engines
How do search engines work

An overview on SEO: Brief
SEO is the process of optimizing a website in terms of increasing its chances of getting a good position in the SERP or rankings in crawler-based listings of search engines (organic as opposed to PPC)
According to Forrester, 81% of consumers use search engines to find products
An interesting fact: According to WebSite Optimization, LLC, only 28.7% of online marketers analyze their stats. Marketers who do check their stats get 25% better conversion rates

An overview on SEO: Benefits
SEO is important for any commercial website because it can:
Drive high quality customers to their website
Build their brand online by communicating marketing messages to their target audience
Increase a brand’s profile against their competitors
Increase sales leads from customers looking for their products and services

An overview on SEO: Major search engines
Top 3 Search Engines
Understanding leading search engine criteria for rankings is key for effective SEO. Simple and effective coding for SEO reaps good results

An overview on SEO: How search engines work
How do Search Engines work?
A spider or crawler which is a component of a SE gathers listings by automatically "crawling" the web
The spider follows links to web pages, makes copies of the pages and stores them in the SE’s index
Based on this data, the SE then indexes the pages and ranks the websites
Spiders read only text, nothing else.
Some can index Flash content, PDF and Word content.
While all can crawl static pages, only some can crawl dynamic pages
The most beneficial SEO practices revolve around:
Keywords and content, page titles, inbound links and internal links
Out of these four, three can be taken care of by accessible websites

An overview on Accessibility
Brief
Legal and Social issue
Benefits
We fix the issue

An overview on Accessibility: Brief
Web Accessibility is about making websites accessible to people, those with special needs or otherwise.
It is a fundamental aspect to the concept of the World Wide Web.
According to Tim-Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW and director of the W3C, “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”
The four broad categories of disabilities are:
Visual - blind, color blind and reduced vision
Hearing - deaf, reduced hearing
Physical - in the case of the web means those with motor disabilities that inhibits the use of the keyboard or mouse
Cognitive/ neurological - dyslexia, memory problems, attention deficit disorder.

An overview on Accessibility: Brief
The disabled use assistive technologies and other tools to access website content as far as possible as others do
Assistive technologies for the blind include screen readers and Braille displays
Almost 10% of the world’s population is disabled in some way. That’s a considerably large percentage of potential audience for us to ignore

An overview on Accessibility: Legal and Social issue
Web Accessibility is an issue in many ways. Of the major ones, a social and legal issue
The Act makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide them any service which it provides to members of the public
Code of Practice, DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), UK
Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities, including employees and members of the public

An overview on Accessibility: Benefits
Benefits of creating an accessible website include:
Fulfilling legal obligation
Covering a wider audience including those with special needs
A website that is accessible by different user agents like cell phones, PDA’s, Web TV (horizontal scrolling not available), text only browsers, etc.
Less time consuming to manage. An accessible website aims to separate content (words, images that we see on the screen) and presentation (the way that these words and images are laid out) of each page and we do so with CSS
Future ready. Websites aren’t particularly optimized for the handheld. With a staggering projection in hand held sales in the next few years, having an accessible website avoids money spent in optimizing a website for them in the future
And last but far away from being the least, automatic SEO

An overview on Accessibility: We fix the issue
Besides responsibly dealing with this issue, a good knowledge of web accessibility helps demonstrate a holistic understanding towards creating websites and differentiates the developer in the world of skilled web designers
As industry professionals, our success in containing these issues lies in how much we want to acquaint ourselves with understanding web accessibility

SEO and Accessibility overlap
Brief
WCAG 2.0, guidelines and those benefiting SEO
Accessibility implementation

SEO and Accessibility overlap: Brief
Search engine spiders are deaf and blind. Like those with visual and hearing disabilities, spiders rely on text just as screen readers, text only browsers and Braille displays rely on text to convey information to users with visual disability
Besides this commonality between spiders and those with visual disabilities (or those that use a shell account), designing websites for other disabilities too benefits SEO
The WCAG guidelines include many points where applying techniques to meet them benefit the SEO strategy automatically

SEO and Accessibility overlap: WCAG 2.0 (working draft)
We will look at WCAG 2.0 working draft instead of WCAG 1. Even though there are expected to be a few changes here and there in the later, the benefits of adopting it are:
There are not significant changes required to make websites confirm to WCAG 2
WCAG 2 is more applicable to current technologies and is more testable as well
6 out of the 13 guidelines benefit SEO as well. That’s a large amount of overlap and a lot of benefit to SEO

SEO and Accessibility overlap: WCAG 2.0 guidelines
(WCAG 2.0 working draft)
1.1 Provide text alternatives for all non-text content
1.2 Provide synchronized alternatives for multimedia
1.3 Ensure information and structure can be separated from presentation
1.4 Easy to distinguish foreground information from its background
2.1 All functionality operable via a keyboard interface
2.2 Allow users to control time limits on their reading or interaction
2.3 Allow users to avoid content that can cause seizures by photosensitivity
2.4 Mechanisms to help user navigation, find content & orient themselves
2.5 Help users avoid mistakes, make it easy to correct mistakes that occur
3.1 Make text content readable and understandable.
3.2 Make the placement and functionality of content predictable.
4.1 Support compatibility with current and future user agents (including AT)
4.2Content is accessible or provide an accessible alternative

SEO and Accessibility overlap: Guidelines benefiting SEO
1.4 Easy to distinguish foreground information from its background
2.1 All functionality operable via a keyboard interface
2.2 Allow users to control time limits on their reading or interaction
2.3 Allow users to avoid content that can cause seizures by photosensitivity
2.5 Help users avoid mistakes, make it easy to correct mistakes that occur
3.2 Make the placement and functionality of content predictable.
4.1 Support compatibility with current and future user agents (including AT)
4.2 Content is accessible or provide an accessible alternative

Accessibility implementation: Guideline 1.1
Where
Images and image maps
Audio and Video
SEO Benefits
Spiders understand what the non textual content is about and index it as opposed to indexing nothing otherwise
Note: While spiders understand text, they certainly don’t interpret text used for visual representation, such as ASCII art
Accessibility
Blind people using text browsers in conjunction with screen readers benefit
How
alt and title attributes
Use sensibly. Images that are for pure decorative purposes don’t require ‘alt’ attributes. Spacer images require empty alt like alt=“”, not alt=“ “, the later is equivalent to a space
Links that are self descriptive don’t require title assigned to them

How (continued)
noembed , noscript
Use of body ( alt , p , longdesc ) in “applet” and “object” and “area” tags

Where
Audio and Video
SEO Benefits
In the particular case that a full text alternative/ transcript is provided for prerecorded audio and video, spiders benefit by comprehending complete information conveyed by the multimedia content. This is also a lot of content as if we describes as much of the multimedia content as we can.
Accessibility
Blind people using text browsers in conjunction with screen readers benefit.
Deaf people benefit
How
Full multimedia text alternative including those of any interaction
Captions for multimedia (open, closed)
Sign language interpretation for multimedia
Audio descriptions for video

How (continued)
Document including correctly sequenced descriptions of all visual settings, actions, and non-speech sounds combined with descriptive transcripts of all dialogue and a means of achieving any outcomes that are achieved using interaction during the multimedia

Where
XHTML, CSS
SEO Benefits
To a spider, the gist of your web page is determined first by what content is at the top of the page
Spiders use structural markup to understand what your web page content is about, and they give more weight to text within heading elements (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.)
Accessibility
Blind people using text browsers in conjunction with screen readers benefit. For example, the presentation format changes when the content is read by a screen reader or when a user style sheet is substituted for the style sheet provided by the author
How
Semantic markup for for paragraphs, headings and lists
Present main content first using CSS

How (continued)
h1 to h6 for headings
li, ul, dl for lists
p for paragraphs
Appropriate table markup for tabular data using caption, summary, scope, id, header, footer attributes
Label tag for forms and title attribute if label tag can’t be assigned Legend and fieldset tags
Practical title tags used for page titles

Where
Sitemaps (relevant to SEO)
SEO Benefits
Search engine spiders can also quickly find and index every single page of your site in the least amount of time. The SEO benefits of using a sitemap far considerable and should not be ignored.
Accessibility
Site maps can be a useful accessibility tool for visually impaired users as they provide a straightforward list of links to the main pages on the site without any of the fluff in between.
Also useful for those with dyslexia for the same reason.
How
Semantic markup for for paragraphs, headings and lists.
Present main content first using CSS.

SEO Benefits
More readable and understandable text means using more words. Even if using more words are not part of your keywords for a page, it increases the chance of a website to appear under a users search phrase.
Major search engines maintain country and language-specific indexes. Specifying the language of a document (or of text within a document) helps search engines decide in which index(es) to place it.
Accessibility
Dyslexic people & those with learning disabilities where it is tough to recognize individual words and sentences.
Those who use screen readers or other technologies that convert text into synthetic speech;
Implementation
Specify language in the doctype
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Implementation
Use abbr, not acronym tags
<abbr title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr>
<acronym title="Joint Information Systems Committee">JISC's<acronym>
IE 6 doesn’t support abbr but supprts acronym. IE7 however supports abbr
Linking to definitions using footnotes, providing a glossary
Use language that avoids jargon that might not be understood by the target audience and is simple and easy to comprehend.

4.1 Support compatibility with current and future user agents (including assistive technologies)
SEO Benefits
The spider is an agent as well.
Accessibility
Ensuring that Web units parse unambiguously helps ensure that assistive technologies can parse the content accurately and without crashing
Implementation
Use semantic markup, making sure tags are closed well and use unique id’s instead of classes. This is one of the other reasons for having web standards

4.2 Content is accessible or provide an accessible alternative
SEO Benefits
Most spiders can’t read scripts; therefore a webpage’s usability should not be crippled when scripts are not supported. Otherwise, search engines may not even index the page, let alone rank it well.
Accessibility
Blind people can access areas they otherwise couldn’t due to the screen reader.
Implementation
Ensure all links are working and as many static links as possible.

Design and content guidelines
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images
Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)
Check pointing with Google

Technical guidelines
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
Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Sitemaps.
If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
Check pointing with Google

SEO
www.searchenginewatch.com
www.seochat.com
www.searchengineguide.com
www.seomoz.org
Accessibility
www.webaim.org
www.w3.org/WAI
www.accessify.com
www.section508.gov
Excellent Resources

Questions?

Feedback

Presentation Details This presentation was given to the Sapient Creative community at the New Delhi office in February 2007, by Abhay Rautela, also creator and moderator of the Sapient Web Accessibility distribution list and accessibility wiki node.

Thank you Website: http://www.conetrees.com Email: hello at conetrees dot com Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/conetrees Useful Quotes on User Experience: http://www.uxquotes.com The UX Practitioners’ resource: http://www.theuxbookmark.com

Join the UX Book Club, New Delhi http://uxbookclub.org/doku.php?id=new_delhi As creator and lead coordinator of the UX Book Club, New Delhi, I’d like you to consider joining us if you are work in user experience in and around New Delhi Join the SlideShare Accessibility Group slideshare.com/group/web-accessibility View and share useful presentations on web accessibility- Join the group

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SEO through Accessibility- How designing accessible websites leads to automatic SEO

by Abhay Rautela on May 02, 2009

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SEO through Accessibility- How designing accessible websites leads to automatic SEO — Presentation Transcript