Website accessibility for SEO
I think its time to bring up website accessibility and SEO again. One of the things that I constantly rant about is that pages load too slowly and are too big, causing rankings to move down. There are several factors that I have been looking at lately that seem to add additional credibility to this logic. The main thing I keep looking at is latency.
One of which is locations of Google crawlers coming into my global sites. A simple analysis that I have done over several sites that I manage concludes that if you have a TLD or an IP address from a country Google will cross the pond from the local country to crawl the foreign sites.
To add further credit to this I have examined other sites in the same industry who actually host their sites within country. These sites out rank 10 to 1 any sites that are hosted back in the US. Now I know what you are thinking, what does this have anything to do with accessibility? EVERYTHING! Imagine a dialup user trying to pull down your fat slow pages over the pond, what a terrible experience! It’s imperative that these basic things come into play with your strategy.
Here is a small list of things that I look at that seem to make a huge difference.
1). Page Load Speed, if it’s over 500MS on average its way too SLOW! Look at your Google Webmaster Tools under the Crawl Rate to see what Google see’s.
2). Page size, how big is your page? Does it really need to be that big? Do you really need 100 images on it? Are they properly tagged? Do you really need all that graphical crap?
3). Text vs Graphics, how much text is a part of your page? No not the same boilerplate that appears on every page. The unique core part of your document.
4). Section 508 elements? Do you have them? ALT tags, are a great start, this is easy stuff to add and can really help you out. Check out Target.com, they got sued for not having them.
One of which is locations of Google crawlers coming into my global sites. A simple analysis that I have done over several sites that I manage concludes that if you have a TLD or an IP address from a country Google will cross the pond from the local country to crawl the foreign sites.
To add further credit to this I have examined other sites in the same industry who actually host their sites within country. These sites out rank 10 to 1 any sites that are hosted back in the US. Now I know what you are thinking, what does this have anything to do with accessibility? EVERYTHING! Imagine a dialup user trying to pull down your fat slow pages over the pond, what a terrible experience! It’s imperative that these basic things come into play with your strategy.
Here is a small list of things that I look at that seem to make a huge difference.
1). Page Load Speed, if it’s over 500MS on average its way too SLOW! Look at your Google Webmaster Tools under the Crawl Rate to see what Google see’s.
2). Page size, how big is your page? Does it really need to be that big? Do you really need 100 images on it? Are they properly tagged? Do you really need all that graphical crap?
3). Text vs Graphics, how much text is a part of your page? No not the same boilerplate that appears on every page. The unique core part of your document.
4). Section 508 elements? Do you have them? ALT tags, are a great start, this is easy stuff to add and can really help you out. Check out Target.com, they got sued for not having them.
Labels: google webmaster tools, section 508 optimization, seo
by Aaron Shear
2 Comments:
I would be curious to find out how you were able to obtain local IPs. I am about to embark on a similar process, putting German, French, Danish and UK English sites up. I was able to get some of the extensions but not all of them, so I was considering just using .com/uk/ etc.
The best advice that I can offer is talk to an ISP in the UK. Try to buy bandwidth and negotiate a class C block in which you can announce out of your own hosting environment. This is not easy to do and requires some funky routing. But is the only way I have been able to get around it.
Best wishes, feel free to email me if you need further help.
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