Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [143]
also neglecting the very things that search engines need. This is discussed in more detail in the next section.
Search Bots and Assistive Technology
Have you read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines yet? If not, then you need to do so. Chapter 4 outlined some of the important aspects of the guidelines, so it is well worth it to refresh yourself on the content. Here’s the link:
www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
Three areas are specifically outlined to help webmasters assess their websites for search engine friendliness: design and content, technical, and quality. For accessibility, I am going to focus on the first two.
The factors I want to emphasize from the design and content section are as follows:
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
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 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. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the alt attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
Make sure that your
elements and alt attributes are descriptive and accurate.<p>Check for broken links and correct HTML.<p><p>Interestingly, the Google guidelines have included the use of the alt attribute since they were first published. Simply following this list in the development or maintenance of a website could save many business owners and developers from troubles with search engines.<p>From the technical section, the following issues have accessibility at the core:<p><p>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.<p>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, because bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.<p>Test your site to make sure it appears correctly in different browsers.<p><p>The next list of pertinent checkpoints is from the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG):<p>www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-WCAG20-20060427/Overview.html#contents<p><p>Guideline 1.1: Provide text alternatives for all nontext content.<p>Guideline 1.3: Ensure that information and structure can be separated from presentation.<p>Guideline 2.1: Make all functionality operable via a keyboard interface.<p>Guideline 2.4: Provide mechanisms to help users find content, orient themselves within it, and navigate through it.<p>Guideline 2.5: Help users avoid mistakes, and make it easy to correct mistakes that do occur.<p>Guideline 3.1: Make text content readable and understandable.<p>Guideline 3.2: Make the placement and functionality of content predictable.<p>Guideline 4.1: Support compatibility with current and future user agents (including assistive technologies).<p>Guideline 4.2: Ensure that content is accessible or provide an accessible alternative.<p><p>When you read the content of these guidelines, you’ll notice similar themes in both sets. Themes of using text alternatives include alt attributes and transcripts for podcasts or captioning for video. Both sets of guidelines address using proper HTML coding, using content to meet the needs of site visitors, and testing the website with various browsers, interfaces, and operating systems in order to test the accessibility for both users and search engines. The list of needs for users</div>
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