Accessibility:-
Accessibility offers quite a few inherent benefits for SEO. The most common metaphor is to consider that a search engine robot is the most frequent disabled visitor your site may receive: it's blind, it navigates with Javascript disabled, and if it can't operate a link it stops cold. Since one of the principles of accessibility is about ensuring that your website can be navigated and understood by a blind visitor who is unable to use Javascript, these characteristics are an automatic guarantee for a well-designed accessible web site.
Best practice accessibility also requires other characteristics of benefit to SEO: use of proper h1, h2, and other heading elements are important for both. Uses of unique title elements which clearly describe the page are valuable for both purposes.
Accessibility features can be abused for the purpose of SEO, however.
A good example of how a tool for accessibility can be misused through SEO is by examining the title attribute. A little explanation the title attribute - title is a means of providing additional information about any element of a webpage. This is significantly different from the title element, described above — which is used to provide search engine results links and is displayed in the header area of your web browser.
Links can have a title attribute explaining where they go, acronyms may have a title providing the expansion of the abbreviation, etc. To an accessibility consultant, the title attribute is a great place to offer assistance to the visually impaired by providing a short, concise explanation in the title. To an SEO consultant the title attribute may be a great place to repeat keywords. Rather than saying "Link to Homepage", they may say "Widgets, gidgets, gadgets and more home pages".
This is not unreasonable once, but when there may be 25 title attributes which all begin with the same phrase it can be very tedious for a visually impaired web user who is listening to the page as read by a screen reader. The title attribute is not, in fact, an element which is read by a screen reader using default settings. However, if it has been enabled this is presumably because that visitor needs the information contained in the title attribute - and this excess verbiage will not be helpful or appreciated.
Positions of importance for keywords include headings, emphasized text (bold or italics), and text which appears early in the page when viewed in a linear fashion. What does that mean? In most HTML based designs, the positioning of elements is accomplished using the table element. Like a table in a word processing document or spreadsheet, the content must appear in a left-right, top-bottom format. However, in a standards based, accessible document, the code is usually presented using an alternate method which is non-linear. The appearance of the elements on the page does not necessarily match the appearance in the HTML code. Thus, your well-written content can appear first to search engines.
URL’s, Title Tag,
URL’s:- URLs, the web address for a particular document, are of great value from a search perspective. They appear in multiple important locations, Since search engines display URLs in the results, they can impact click through and visibility. URLs are also used in ranking documents, and those pages whose names include the queried search terms receive some benefit from proper, descriptive use of keywords.URLs make an appearance in the web browser's address bar, and while this generally has little impact on search engines, poor URL structure and design can result in negative user experiences. URLs are frequently utilized as links by third parties, and as such, carry anchor text that is interpreted by search engines and users alike. Short, descriptive, compelling, keyword-laden URLs can thus provide both click-through and search ranking benefits.
Below are several guidelines to construct great URLs:
1. Employ Empathy
Place yourself in the mind of a user and look at your URL. If you can easily and accurately predict the content you'd expect to find on the page, your URLs are appropriately descriptive. You don't need to spell out every last detail in the URL, but a rough idea is a good starting point.
2.Shorter is Better
While a descriptive URL is important, minimizing length and trailing slashes will make your URLs easier to copy and paste (into emails, blog posts, text messages, etc) and will be fully visible in the search results.
3. Keyword Use is Important (but Overuse is Dangerous)
If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don't go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for SEO purposes - overuse will result in less usable URLs and can trip spam filters (from email clients, search engines, and even people!).
4. Go Static
With technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, there's no excuse not to create simple, static URLs. Even single dynamic parameters in a URL can result in lower overall ranking and indexing (SEO tutorial blog itself switched from dynamic URLs - e.g. http://seotutorialblog.blogspot.com )
5. Choose Descriptive Whenever Possible
Rather than selecting numbers or meaningless figures to categorize information, use real words. For example, a URL likes http://www.indiawebmediapro.com/webDevelopment.html is far more usable and valuable than http://www.indiawebmediapro.com/wbdev.html
6.Use Hyphens to Separate Words
Not all of the search engines accurately interpret separators like underscore "_," plus "+," or space "%20," so use the hyphen "-" character to separate words in a URL.
This tag can be used to control search engine spider activity (for all of the major engines) on a page level (for site-wide spider control, the robots.txt file is a better choice). There are several ways to use meta robots to control how search engines treat a page:
1. Index/NoIndex tells the engines whether the page should be crawled and kept in the engines' index for retrieval. If you opt to use "noindex," the page will be excluded from the engines. By default, search engines assume they can index all pages, so using the "index" value is generally unnecessary.
2.Follow/NoFollow tells the engines whether links on the page should be crawled. If you elect to employ "nofollow," the engines will disregard the links on the page both for discovery and ranking purposes. By default, all pages are assumed to have the "follow" attribute.
3.Noarchive is used to restrict search engines from saving a cached copy of the page. By default, the engines will maintain visible copies of all pages they indexed, accessible to searchers through the "cached" link in the search results.
4.Nosnippet informs the engines that they should refrain from displaying a descriptive block of text next to the page's title and URL in the search results.
5.NoODP is a specialized tag telling the engines not to grab a descriptive snippet about a page from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) for display in the search results.
6.NoYDir, like NoODP, is specific to Yahoo!, informing that engine not to use the Yahoo! Directory description of a page/site in the search results
SYNTAX: <
The tag above would tell spiders not to index the page, to refrain from archiving a copy while following the links, and to refrain from using DMOZ as a description in the search results. The "NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE" combination may be redundant for any search engines who do not archive non-indexed pages, but nonetheless it doesn't hurt to be thorough.
Title tag
It could be said that the title is one of the most important factors for a successful search engine optimization of your website. Located within the
section, right above the Description and Keywords tag, it provides summarized information about your website. Besides that, the title is what appears on search engines result page (SERP).The title tags should be between 10-60 characters. This is not a law, but a relative guideline - a few more symbols is not a problem. You won't get penalized for having longer title tags, but the search engine will simply ignore the longer part.
Search-Friendly Text
Making the visible text on a page "search-friendly" isn't complicated, but it is an issue that many sites struggle with. Text styles that cannot be indexed by search engines include:
- Text embedded in a Java Application or Macromedia Flash file
- Text in an image file - jpg, gif, png, etc
- Text accessible only via a form submit or other on-page action
If the search engines can't see your page's text, they cannot spider and index that content for visitors to find. Thus, making search-friendly text in HTML format is critical to ranking well and getting properly indexed. If you are forced to use a format that hides text from search engines, try to use the right keywords and phrases in headlines, title tags, URLs, and image/file names on the page. Don't go overboard with this tactic, and never try to hide text (by making it the same color as the background or using CSS tricks). Even if the search engines can't detect this automatically, a competitor can easily report your site for spamming and have you de-listed entirely.
Along with making text visible, it's important to remember that search engines measure the terms and phrases in a document to extract a great deal of information about the page. Writing well for search engines is both an art and a science (as SEOs are not privy to the exact, technical methodology of how search engines score text for rankings), and one that can be harnessed to achieve better rankings.
In general, the following are basic rules that apply to optimizing on-page text for search rankings:
- Make the primary term/phrase prominent in the document - Measurements like keyword density are useless (see kw density myth read), but general frequency can help rankings.
- Make the text on-topic and high quality - Search engines use sophisticated lexical analysis to help find quality pages, as well as teams of researchers identifying common elements in high quality writing. Thus, great writing can provide benefits to rankings, as well as visitors.
- Use an optimized document structure - The best practice is generally to follow a journalistic format wherein the document starts with a description of the content, then flows from broad discussion of the subject to narrow. The benefits of this are arguable, but in addition to SEO value, they provide the most readable and engaging informational document. Obviously, in situations where this would be inappropriate, it's not necessary.
- Keep text together - Many folks in SEO recommend using CSS rather than table layouts in order to keep the text flow of the document together and prevent the breaking up of text via coding. This can also be achieved with tables - simply make sure that text sections (content, ads, navigation, etc.) flow together inside a single table or row and don't have too many "nested" tables that make for broken sentences and paragraphs.
Keep in mind that the text layout and keyword usage in a document no longer carries high importance in search engine rankings. While the right structure and usage can provide a slight boost, obsessing over keyword placement or layout will provide little overall benefit.
The document and link structure of a website can provide benefits to search rankings when performed properly. The keys to effective architecture are to follow the rules that govern human usability of a site:
- Make Use of a Sitemap - It's wise to have the sitemap page linked to from every other page in the site, or at the least from important high-level category pages and the home page. The sitemap should, ideally, offer links to all of the site's internal pages. However, if more than 100-150 pages exist on the site, a wiser system is to create a sitemap that will link to all of the category level pages, so that no page in a site is more than 2 clicks from the home page. For exceptionally large sites, this rule can be expanded to 3 clicks from the home page.
- Use a Category Structure that Flows from Broad > Narrow - Start with the broadest topics as hierarchical category pages, then expand to deep pages with specific topics. Using the most on-topic structure tells search engines that your site is highly relevant and covers a topic in-depth.
One of the most common and problematic issues for website builders, particularly those with larger, dynamic sites powered by databases, is the issue of duplicate content. Search engines are primarily interested in unique documents and text, and when they find multiple instances of the same content, they are likely to select a single one as "canonical" and display that page in their results.
If your site has multiple pages with the same content, either through a content management system that creates duplicates through separate navigation, or because copies exist from multiple versions, you may be hurting those pages' chances of ranking in the SERPs. In addition, the value that comes from anchor text and link weight, through both internal and external links to the page, will be diluted by multiple versions.
The solution is to take any current duplicate pages and use a 301 re-direct (described in detail here) to point all versions to a single, "canonical" edition of the content.
One very common place to look for this error is on a site's homepage - oftentimes, a website will have the same content on http://www.url.com, http://url.com, and http://www.url.com/index.html. That separation alone can cause lost link value and severely damage rankings for the site's homepage. If you find many links outside the site pointing to both the non-www and the www version, it may be wise to use a 301 re-write rule to affect all pages at one so they point to the other.
