SEO - thoughtful and well-designed accessibility

Understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

For many Web visitors, when they look for information, search engines have come to be the primary source about both the online as well as the offline world. Just Google alone claims to have a billion searches daily. Let's face it - search engines are a part of our daily lives.

That makes search engine optimization more important now than ever before. As a website owner, you should be proud of creating a well thought-out, easily navigable website that is also user friendly and has a great content.

SEO is about removing barriers between search engines and your content. To do this effectively, you must first concentrate on your website accessibility and content. It must be so done for your long-term success instead of some short-term gains. You must demonstrate to the search engines that your website content is the most relevant to the visitors needs.

Many thoughtful and well-designed features go into the concept of accessibility when it comes to SEO. Websites with out-dated design methods with not employing the most basic concepts of modern SEO will fail and have failed.

Design with CSS and no Tables
Designers, following Web 2.0 concepts, are increasingly adopting Cascading Style Sheet - CSS - for table-less design. CSS allows far less code to be used, creating a higher content-to-code ratio. Search engines typically use a top-down logic in determining the nature of website content. Therefore, by using CSS, web masters can clean up their code and arrange content to make it more accessible to search engines. The search spiders, thus, are able to differentiate between code and content easily.

Sitemaps
Sitemaps are XML files that list the URL of Web pages residing on a domain host to provide search engines with easy access to the entire contents of your website. XML files provide additional metadata about the frequency of change. A uniform standard for sitemaps has been created and is supported by the three major search engines, namely, Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Metadata - Titles, Descriptions and More
Metadata is simple information about a certain Web page. It includes the title, description, and keywords. When formulating titles and descriptions for each unique page of your site, equal attention must be given to the density of keywords and phrases as well as how you formulate your text for maximum readability.

H1, H2 and H3 tags
These three header tags should appear at several spots on a page, breaking up content and make it easier to read. It also provides clues to search engines about the structure and content of a page. Header tags provide site optimizers with a place to include descriptive, keyword-rich content and indicate - to both search engines and visitors - the importance of a page section.