Accessibility is one of the most important aspects of your web site or blog. The idea is to be able to cater to a wide range of readers. From those who are physically challenged to those who are technologically challenged – you should bear them in mind when working on your blog or web site. Why is this so?

With the Internet being as prevalent as it is today, practically everyone has access to it. Statistics would probably show that there is a huge percentage of Net users who are challenged in some way, supporting the idea that web site or blog owners should make sure that their site is accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

How do you make your web site accessible?

Consider the wide range of devices that are being used to access the Internet. Before, only computers were used to go online. Today, there is a host of other gadgets. Mobile phones are probably the second most common gadget used to go online. Then we have other things such as gaming consoles, both portable and otherwise, PDAs, and the like. You have to bear in mind these things as more and more people are accessing the Internet using gadgets other than computers and laptops.

In relation to the different devices, you should also bear in mind that these devices have different software – different operating systems, different Internet browsers. You should consider these things when designing your site.

(to be continued)

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If you have been following various SEO blogs and web sites, then I am sure that you are familiar with the description meta tag. After all, it is one of the most basic (and important) considerations when optimizing your site. However, just in case you are not familiar with it, the description meta tag is basically what provides search engines (Google included) with the necessary information as to what a page is all about. You can call it a summary of sorts. In your HTML code, the meta tag is found within the tag.

So what should you bear in mind when using the description meta tag? Here are some tips, again from Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

Accurately summarize the page’s content – Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.

Avoid:
• writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
• using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about baseball cards”
• filling the description with only keywords
• copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag

Use unique descriptions for each page – Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn’t feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page’s content.

Avoid:
• using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large
group of pages

The key here is in being as specific as possible. The idea is to provide Google AND your human readers with the necessary information they need to determine whether the page is relevant to their query or not. More than being specific, though, remember to give an accurate representation of the contents of the page. The last thing that a user would want is to think that a page contains certain information only to find out that they have been misled.

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Were you convinced by the debunking we did on some web site optimization myths in the previous post? I sure hope so. Yet that was not the end – there are more myths out there than we can count. Let’s try to look at some more myths and see if we can provide alternatives.

I have no time. Web site optimization is too time consuming.
How true is this idea? Practically untrue, I would say. Web site optimization is not an added task to your daily web site development task. The truth is, a lot of the basic principles involved in web site optimization can be incorporated into what you are already doing. Focusing on content so that you can optimize your web site is one of the major things. What you need to do is have a vision of how to optimize your web site and take the steps towards this goal as you continue to work on the site.

I need at least 1,000 submissions to be visible.
Gosh, every time I see an ad promising 1,000 search engine submissions to potential clients, I want to tear my hair out by the roots. Even more frustrating is that some people actually buy this line! Think about it, how many search engines are there? Do you really think there are 1,000++ search engines in existence?

I just need to pay someone to do the job for me – I don’t need to do any work myself.
Well, you can pay someone to optimize your web site for you but that does not mean that you do not have to exert any effort. You know your content best. Optimization professionals may not know your topic inside out as well as you do. Though you can pay someone to do the technical stuff, do not totally exclude yourself.

Photo courtesy of G&M

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As many other people have noticed, sometimes, SEO efforts can tend to become too focused on search engines. Though obviously, the search engines should be a prime consideration, we cannot totally discount the importance of the end users – human users. This is what user experience is all about.

In SEO parlance, user experience is also dubbed as UE or UX. To be honest, I only came across this term recently, thanks to Shari Thurow at Search Engine Land. In a post published yesterday, she shares her thoughts on UX:

Search engine optimization is all about the user experience, because the idea behind SEO is to get users to their desired information and destination(s) as quickly and easily as possible by using the users’ language (keywords). Searchers type in keywords at a commercial web search engine. Searchers’ expectations are validated in search results pages and, hopefully, after they click on links within those search results…a perfect, seamless user experience.

An important point that we should put under consideration is the difference between UX and the perceived UX, the former being what human users actually experience and the latter being what SEO experts may think their users want to experience. Though sometimes, these two factors jive, more often than not, there is a disparity. That is why it is important that when working on SEO, you have to bear in mind UX – the real deal. Do not be limited by your own perceptions, actually open your mind to reality and adjust your strategies accordingly.

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In this day and age, things do not have to be expensive to be good – right?  I suppose nothing is exempt from this kind of thinking, not even SEO.  And with SEO being a very popular activity these days, it is not a surprise that you see countless companies touting their expertise in the field.  Some focus on promoting the idea that they are the best while others focus on the concept that they are the cheapest.  So which one should you go with?

I read an article earlier today tackling the very same question.  It provided me with some food for thought:

There is a saying that ‘Cheap’ and ‘Best’ do not exist together.

The costs coming down do not reflect on the quality of the work however. With more and more channels of optimization in place, companies providing search engine optimization services are able to work on entire new strategies; Strategies that were not around a few years ago, like social networking, and video marketing. These new age strategies ensure that the exposure for a customer is maximum, while keeping the costs at a minimum.

Indeed, just because a product or service is cheaper than others does not mean that you are sacrificing quality.  So when you find yourself looking for an SEO provider, try to bear this in mind.  However, do make sure that the quality that you’re looking for is there – don’t be blinded by the low cost!

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