Category Archives: section 508 optimization

Website accessibility for SEO

Posted by on February 7, 2007 No comments

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.

Target.com discriminates the blind, Judge ok’s lawsuit

Posted by on September 8, 2006 No comments

As I posted before, it is very critical to make your site section 508 friendly. This does not mean fully compliant, you can add just a few features to the site to make it friendlier.

Information on the case

People may argue that there are not enough users out there, but that is just not true.

Here are a few simple tips for checking your site.

1). Mouse over all your images, can you see words?

2). What do the words say? Are they helpful?

3). Is your navigation in text or images? Make them text.

4). Final test, can you find your site in Google accessible search, I find this to be a simple way to double check.

5). Try to navigate your site using LYNX, the text only browser included with most Linux releases.

Still not sure? Call an SEO firm that knows Section 508 for help!

Section 508 and SEO

Posted by on August 16, 2006 No comments

What is Section 508 and why is it important to you and your SEO?

1). In some cases it could be considered discrimination of certain persons with disabilities. In the case of Target.com, a law suit against them with help of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).

2). Did you know that according to the government there are over 58 million Americans with disabilities?

A few things you can do about it.

1). Make sure you can see your entire site with a text browser, like LYNX.

2). Clearly label your photo’s, name the files correctly and at ALT tags.

3). Make sure your Anchor Text links use words that clearly explain what is on the other end of the link. “HOME” does not cut it.

4). Use a text navigation; if you perform a “CTRL-A” on your pages can you see the text highlighted in the nav?

These are a few of the simple things you can do to your site to make them more accessible. Additionally if your visually impaired users cannot check out they are not going to buy anything. I can tell you from personal experience the internet is an incredible play ground for people with visual impairments. If you reach out to the community and ask them how they like your site, they will respond and help you. Do the right thing, and improve your SEO rankings at the same time!