Now, some of you may ask why would you take the time to make your site more accesible to all user? Actually, by doing so not only you are doing a good favor for the visually impaired community, it will also make your site easily crawled by bots.
And what can you do to make your sites more accessible?
Google webmasters has been developing a special search tool called Google Accessible Search located in http://labs.google.com/accessible/
This search, tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully: pages with few visual distractions and that are likely to render well with images turned off. Flashing banners and dancing animals are probably the worst thing you could put on your site if you want its content to be read by an adaptive technology like a screen reader.
Here are some basic tips from Google Webmasters:
- Keep web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter and ensuring that the primary purpose of the web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.
- There are many organizations and online resources that offer website owners and authors guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including Web Content Access Guidelines that are helpful for website owners and authors.
- As with regular search, the best thing you can do with respect to making your site rank highly is to create unique, compelling content. In fact, you can think of the Google crawler as the world’s most influential blind user. The content that matters most to the Googlebot is the content that matters most to the blind user: good, quality text.
- It’s also worth reviewing your content to see how accessible it is for other end users. For example, try browsing your site on a monochrome display or try using your site without a mouse. You may also consider your site’s usability through a mobile device like a Blackberry or iPhone.
17.Mar.08 
Internet Marketing Strategies 
Comments (0)
This is one hot debate about SEO is on sites which are using Flash. As many of you already know, Flash is good visual appealing medium, while the Googlebot
doesn’t have eyes. When googlebot crawls a site containing flash medias, this is what they get,
- Googlebot can typically read Flash files
- Extract the text and links in them,
However, the structure and context are missing which is actually bad for SEO. You see, Googlebot doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these
graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. So the question is "what’s an honest web designer to do?". Here’s the list to start with :-
- Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation.
- sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
- Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page "splash screen" where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.
05.Mar.08 Internet Marketing Strategies Comment (1)
A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.
1) Navigation purposes
A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
2) Conveying your site’s theme
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.
3) Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.
4) Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.
18.Feb.08 Internet Marketing Strategies Comment (1)
