Accessibility! Usability! What do search engine optimisation specialists do that you can´t? www.contentClix.com

Accessibility, Usability, SEO, copywriting, technology, W3, keywords, online marketing

Last year was the year of search engine marketing and the experts predict the saga is going to continue full swing until at least in 2010. When you set out to work on your site’s visibility, it is useful to know what the professionals that you cannot afford to outsource the whole headache to are up to and beat them at the game. Scanning SEO news, it's pretty obvious that high search engine rankings still are the be-all-and-end-all of online marketing, but things are beginning to move on from here. The new buzzwords that stand out are accessibility and usability and renewed energy is poured in what are believed to be new opportunities in areas like local marketing. But how much bang for your buck will you get this time?

If the popularity of the words accessibility and usability themselves is any indicator -and it is- many people apparently are doing research into them and even more are offering in-depth advice. A keyword tracking tool like wordtracker shows this in a matter of seconds. Over the last two months ‘accessibility’ has been scoring a count of 158 and usability more than double that number, 308. Not a lot of queries perhaps compared to a word like ‘shoes’ or ‘digital cameras’ or any tangible product you might be selling, but then –luckily- there are not as many SEO businesses out there as shoe shops.

So how do accessibility and usability factor in SEO strategies. Is it again more of the same or are you missing out on vital elements if you simply improve on your existing optimising strategies? As your strategy for online marketing is on its way and you are getting the hang of having the right keywords to describe your business, it´s time to integrate everything yet again and focus on your site´s usability and accessibility.

What is meant by usability is generally how well a site can be navigated through links, graphics and text. All your optimising efforts should have one goal in mind: attracting customers. Does your site still provide valuable information to your human visitors now that the spiders and robots can read it? This is key. Personalization and relevancy are going hand in hand in everybody's sane mind and this notion is being translated into the search engine algorithms with stunning precision. Online shop owners simply cannot ignore the sophistication of customers any longer and customers' expectations are rising in line as they see their demands met. Technology is increasingly finding answers to human needs.

Strategies can be made or broken simply on wording and context. It’s no use optimising for search engines if the visitors to your site are not going to be impressed by what they read. Overly-complex phrasing will have to become a thing of the past and using common sense, neutral language will open up the content to a wider audience of search terms. It really is best to get a copywriter to do this for you. If you are not sure whether your site needs a professional writer’s touch, there are some tools you can run over it to see if your linked terms actually make sense in the wider context. Throw your pages through some tools and consider getting in touch with us for a quote if you think it is advisible. One tool that we found to be quite useful can be downloaded via www.ezapplications.com

Accessibility What's understood as 'accessibility' of sites appears to be more of a technological issue than usability. You will have what is generally considered an 'accessible’ website if it can be read by all browsers. Providing as much ‘access’ to your site/content as possible perhaps has a number of added dimensions that you are not aware of and it is good to pay notice to every aspect of the matching between your content and the search engines.

The various limitations of browsers other than Internet Explorer and Netscape are quite distinct and need paying attention to during this stage of your optimisation efforts. For instance, the Lynx browser is a text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS, images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content. There are various tools that replace images in the form of ALT text, JavaScript through the

There are two good ways you can check how accessible your website is. Simply download the Lynx browser to see if you can successfully access all your pages and download the operabrowser and follow their excellent instructions to enhanced accessibility. Good SEOs focus on a few standard setting organisations’ guidelines, which are complex systems of rules on unifying coding. What SEOs make sure of is that users from other languages and cultures, and users of differing age groups are not excluded from your site because of some technical hiccups.

SEOs say they use numerous checklists to make sure your business in whatever location or segment it is, is 100% geared to reach your customers. Be aware however that there is still a lot of scepticism on the strategies in use for reaching more localised markets. It remains to be seen whether better accessible local business site optimisation will actually translate into tangible higher return on investment numbers. Local search appears to be performing well for national advertisers seeking to segment markets. The local dry cleaner however doesn't have (or probably need) a website so the lead is not accurately tracked, and the value remains doubtful. Don’t buy into it until you see results from comparable segments to the one you are in.

All lists SEO’s use to make sure your site is technically kosher are likely variations in one form or another of the lengthy, prioritised in-depth checkpoints published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding of the web. It can be found here: It is not deemed 100% fool proof, but it’s said to be Google-proof. The checklist consists of general, common-sense priorities that designers and programmers must take heed of. The bulk of the checkpoints are likely issues you’ve complied with for years already, but it’s always good to see if there’s anything new. It could give you that edge over the competition!

Search engines increasingly take their lead from Google and use hyper linked text for relevancy so checking that your links make sense all the time is not a luxury but incremental for your business. Some SEOs will run software that check that if a hyperlink is removed from the text –something that easily happens in forms- and determine whether it still makes sense in the general context of your site. An SEO would replace a simple hyperlinked word like ‘more’, with a more descriptive term such as ‘more news and events’, or similar. You get the idea here.

Source code in general is also quite important. Again, w3 sets important standards and you can run your site through their validator tool (http://validator.w3.org/) to see if search engine spiders/robots have any problems splitting your content/page into sections before indexing it – e.g. header, metadata tags, headings, normal text, etc. If the spider has difficulty in calculating the structure of your code, some of the text could be misclassified or omitted. Find out!

Angelique van Engelen runs www.contentClix.com, an Amsterdam-based freelance copywriting agency. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and London for over six years before returning to her home country, the Netherlands. Aside from writing web content, she specialises in copywriting, feature articles and research reports.

Return to Last Page

Thank you and Enjoy!