When creating a web site or other online content it is really important to ensure you haven’t broken SEO. Taking it even further, it is today (in the UK) a legal requirement to make that content Accessible to people (and devices), to ensure it is possible for your users to get to that content. This is also often where the misunderstandings begin.
Very often SEO/Accessibility specialists are being asked to “weave their magic” and to “do their thing” too early on in the project, already when there is no actual real ready-to-go-live content. It is too often being asked when the site consist of pretty pixels filled with “Lorem Ipsum…”. There is no text to extract keywords or to make cunning headlines from. Even worse, the request itself shows a deep lack of understanding to the task itself, and usually confirms that a checkbox on a project plan needs to be ticked so “why not do that now even though we are behind on the other things”.
So, lets clear this up a bit whilst keeping the nitty-gritty details out of it.
SEO, roughly and simplified, consist of three parts
- Making sure there isn’t “too much” code (front-end, ie HTML/JavaScript/CSS) in the pages that will hinder search engine spiders scanning and indexing your content. You quite simply don’t want to much code to be “in the way” of the spiders as they’ll get tired and wander off. This is normally sorted by having coders that understand semantic code and W3C standards working on designs that are signed off.
- SEO after that usually happens in teams that know and understand how buying keywords and cross site linking work. Those keywords then get deep-linked into either specific content pieces of the web site or link back to the home page.This obviously requires a few things in itself: An existing URL (to give :Google: etc something specific to link to) and a site map where the various pages actually respond to visits by the search engines when they want to verify the content and the keyword actually are relevant to each other.If you do this on a staging server (or in a non-live folder) you have to remap the entire thing as your linkage otherwise will point in the wrong directions.
- The most important one: Content. Well written content at that. Content is King, and this is probably the area of web site creation where it is most painfully obvious.If in doubt, try almost any search term in :Google: and look at responses from :Wikipedia: which categorically ends up amongst the first responses, all without pretty pixels or amazing teams of SEO specialists fine-tuning and tweaking the content or buying keywords.Knowing when to repeat content and keywords and when not to also require skills (or at least an understanding) from the content editor/copy writer.
Things that often are misunderstood with Accessibility:
- “Checking all the checkboxes in the check list is the most important thing”. Well, no.This request usually comes from someone at client side not fully understanding what this actually means, and being relayed to someone at agency side who also don’t fully understand it, so lets clarify: if you indeed can tick all the boxes, well done. It is not a bad thing, so don’t take this the wrong way.It should be noted it isn’t the be-all-end-all though.If you have tried to check them all, but have a decent reason to why one in particular can’t be checked without spending 100% more time/budget on it, you are usually off quite fine still, and if you in your attempt to make your site/service Accessible have tried to check them all and failed to check one your site is most probably going to be one of the leading sites out there when it comes to an Accessibility perspective.Just like code validation it could be seen as a target, but it doesn’t have to be the goal. Our goal should not be to display various logos from Bobby or W3C, our goal should be to create an Accessible site for as many users as possible. If you, for whatever reason, fail to check a box, tell your users how/why on the Accessibility statement, and if at all possible, point them to an alternative source for that content.It should also be noted that the checklist itself often is dated compared to new technological advancements and increased capability of the tools disabled people are using. At times, checking every Accessibility checklist check box can, depending on your target audience, create a less Accessible experience, which leads on to…
- Accessibility Statements. It is a debated point, where some claim they are useless and some say they are really important. Depending on how you treat your Accessibility statement they can probably help.Remember though: this is not where you “brag” about what you’ve done, in a business language so dry it turns into a misguided PR campaign in itself.Instead this is where you have a golden opportunity to communicate with your users in a language they understand, and where you tell them what you have done, what you haven’t done and to otherwise help them to navigate your site/service in alternative ways.However, until you’ve actually done the work, and figured out what you have/haven’t done, it makes little to no difference in having the statement itself as it then will be in a state between either empty or a wish-list-yet-to-happen, which obviously can be a good thing, but it then should be called “work-in-progress statement” or something.
Though this list above is not extensive by any means it would be a good start if more people knew at least some of it by heart, so they therefore understood why some things can’t be done in the order they are being asked to be done. If it helps one project understand the value of creating a site for its users first and foremost we can do the other bits, such as SEO and Accessibility statements, as well, because they are important, true enough. They are not more important than the actual content though, and never will be.
