Benefits Of Accessibility Check And Search Engine Optimization

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Search Engine Optimization

With the advancement in technology and the introduction of a new range of devices, new possibilities are opened for Internet access. Every website owner wants to be more visible on search engines and social networks. SEOs of most companies understand the benefits of ‘accessibility and Search Engine Optimization’. They know what they are and how they matter so much. More efforts are being made to make the content findable, accessible and understandable by the masses on the whole range of devices(small PC Computers, tablets, Phones, Gaming devices, TVs, e-readers, voice-controlled computers in cars) they use. A website is built to accommodate all. Thus, they are device-independent, and their user interface is prepared to fit all devices.

Web admins install browser development tools to evaluate screen readers of platforms like Windows, Mac or Linux. Using HTML5, they now have better semantic markup and accessibility standards, thus making the website more user-friendly and easy for web developers to manage. Also, it is easy for search engines to read content. Google and other search engines still don’t’ understand videos and images, so it becomes essential that they are correctly marked up. People pull and share the content on social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. The site, which is easily accessible, becomes more shareable.

Now, there are accurate and descriptive headers, images, and links with proper markup and an easily accessible menu (both single-level and drop-down) with the unordered list.

Accessibility Tools for Web Developers
Standard tools are available with all modern web browsers to check for accessibility issues and SEO, which proved to be convenient tools in website building. Most of the users browse on IE, Firefox or Google Chrome. They can add add-ons or plug-ins.

Tools available on Firefox – Search Engine Optimization

From Addons.mozilla.org, accessibility testing tools can be installed.

Developer Tools – with this tool, objects visible in a browser can be turned on or off. For example, turn off All Styles to view the site without CSS. Similarly, you can view the page without images or other objects. This is done to test the various markups for the objects.

Firebug – Once installed, a button appears in the right corner of the browser, and when clicked, it provides the CSS output in the right corner of the browser.

SenSEO – to reveal the hidden SEO info of a page. Firefox displays info title, description, keywords of a page, web address, type of text, encoding, size and meta tags by right-clicking anywhere on the page and selecting View Page Info. This is the information search engines are viewing, and with SenSEO, what search engines see can be unveiled. Search engines and Social Networks like Facebook or Google+ capture the text from meta-data provided on the page, which can be controlled.

Accessibility Checks – Search Engine Optimization

Language Check: In the HTML tag, put <html lang= “en-US”> to tell the search engine and text speech browser that the content is in US English. If it is in another language, a browser will detect the language and offer a translation option. If the page contains multiple languages, then codes for those languages must be embedded. These codes can be referenced from the site w3schools.com
Proper Meta tags: Provides additional information to a page hidden in a browser but provides information to search engines. Each page must have a good title and description. A description must be brief and under 160 characters; you can try to embed the primary keyword in both the title and description. You can add keywords also, but they are becoming less important to search engines.
Use HTML5 semantic codes: HTML is now in the 5th iteration, thus the name HTML5. Start using the new tags provided in HTML5; they are easier to understand and prepare your page for future added functionality in browsers. The codes are now meaningful and give the info about the content.
Give proper headings and descriptions to your page’s different sections (menus, content, sidebars, and footers) to define and separate them. They can be hidden or taken out of context for a regular browser viewer looking for content. You can shift them away from the screen by positioning absolute and padding it to -9999px.
Use ordered or unordered lists for related and sequential content that should appear together, like menus, comments, and galleries.
Use the Title attribute in links and images after hyperlink reference for additional information. Similarly, the ‘alt’ attribute is also necessary for images as per standard compliance; they provide a text-format image description. If an image is a link, the alt text must be the same as the title.
For multi-level content, use headings h1 to h6 – making a page more accessible for people and search engines to navigate, parse, and understand.
Use to strongly emphasize instead of and for emphasis instead of – Both the tags and have a stylistic approach, but they don’t put any weight on the web, as what action to be performed. Using the CSS, (font-style: italic;) and (font-weight: bold;) can also be stylized.
Use of <blockquote> to indicate quotation – If the content is from some other website or wants to divert the user’s attention that somebody has said this text. This validates the text as it can be linked out to the source to be more transparent. Use the <cite> tag when the content refers to another source. Link the source so that viewers can reach it. This can be the best strategy to get links from other sources.
Use tag for copyright statements, conditions, rules and legal disclaimers.
Use the <meter> tag to display the data range like “8 out of 10”. <meter value=”8” minimum=”1” maximum=”5”>. Perfect tag for the sites, displaying the ratings, reviews, etc.
<abbr> tag for abbreviations and acronyms to provide extra information. Once the reader has moused over it, a little pop-up will display additional information about it.