1 Common sense

I find it almost amazing that so much of good practices in web design come down to using common sense. When you try like me to create fast-loading, accessible, maintainable and findable web sites, you will find that these different aspects do not cancel each other out, but in fact the same solution applies to all and a solution for one problem benefits the other. This article shows how making a site accessible also benefits your findability. Building with the Standards in mind gives so many benefits you wonder why not everyone is doing it.

posted at 02:14 am on November 08, 2005 by Rob Hofker

2 Interesting Read

There is way too much BS floating around these days. SEO shouldn’t be a career – it’s just a practice of effective web developers.

I would like to explore web semantics as a means to optimize search engine results, or to make those results more meaningful.

What this is all about is getting information into a format that is universally understandable by machines and humans alike – across all platforms.

At work, my case for adopting microformats is beginning to be heard because I’m calling it “SEO”. Most companies don’t care about things like device independence, handicapped accessibility, or ease-of-development – they only care about money and traffic. Calling the adoption of web standards or applying semantics to a page “Search Engine Optimization” may well be the excuse we’ve all been looking for :)

posted at 02:57 am on November 08, 2005 by Rob Goodlatte

3 Excellent article

I had come to this conclusion myself a while ago.

The W3C has accesibility validators which are quite useful for checking parts of your white hat SEO.

posted at 03:32 am on November 08, 2005 by Moose s

4 Good Point

2 has a great point – if businesses start to think of incorporating accessibility and standards into their sites as something that can help make them money, they’re far more likely to go for it.

posted at 04:06 am on November 08, 2005 by Dan Bailey

5 Good Article

Is perceivable that Google index accessibility sites better than others. This is other motivation to web designers/developers change yours way to create sites.

posted at 05:33 am on November 08, 2005 by Ciro Feitosa

6 Actual Results?

Now I’m not one to poo-poo these kinds of articles—this is exactly what I preach to my clients day-in and day-out.

But what I’ve yet to see (possibly through my own lack of metrics) is actual, feasible results. The kind of results clients will pay for when I offer them “additional SEO work for their site” (legacy sites only, of course—accessibility and CSS layout should be mandatory on all new stuff).

Does anyone in this discussion have something of that nature to offer? I feel it would be a huge boost.

posted at 06:03 am on November 08, 2005 by Brad Wright

7 Some Things to Consider

I have been saying much of this to folks where I work, unfortunately I haven’t been able to find the correlative materials (other articles etc.) that could make a viable case for this. However, I had also not thought of tieing it directly into SEO.

Armed with this, while I may still get a fair amount of guff for hopping on my sopa bax to preach accessibility in web design again, I know that some folks, those who really care any way, will be listening.

Thanks for a great read.

posted at 06:42 am on November 08, 2005 by Jeffrey Allen

8 Actual results

A few years ago when I was job-hunting, I was called into an interview specifically because my name had jumped to the top of the Google search results (this is no longer the case, but then that’s probably a good thing – I doubt that most people searching for Matt Robinson are looking for me!) The interviewer wanted to know how I’d done it, what the magic secret was that made Google sit up and notice me above all the other Matt Robinsons out there, and the answer was “simple, accessible, semantically marked-up HTML”.

It’s not just personal experience, either. I was introduced to one of the black-hat SEO (for Google specifically) guides last month, where various people measured the effect of certain Google-defeating tricks over time, and the enduring and verified techniques were virtually all compatible with best-practice accessible, semantic site code and content design. Nearly the others faded in usefulness over time, or even became actively penalised by Googlebot, but good, clear and simple code still has my sites 2nd and 4th on an ego-search at the time of writing.

posted at 08:24 am on November 08, 2005 by Matt Robinson

9 I fully agree from experience

As a professionnal SEO interested in web design and accessibility/ergonomy matters, I can testify of the validity of all things beings said in this article.

I even wrote some times ago an article very similar to this one (in french) : http://s.billard.free.fr/referencement/index.php?2005/01/13/3-article-referencement-et-accessibilite

By respecting standard and accessibility guidelines, you are sure to remove all barriers that could block spiders and presenting information in a well structured and semantically meaningful way.

posted at 08:28 am on November 08, 2005 by Sebastien Billard

10 How to apply recommendations to a photo site?

I am currently redesigning a web site which sole purpose is to showcase photos that I take. I started using XHTML/CSS/Accessibility just to get a feeling of what these technologies have to offer.

The main content of this site are photographs. Apart from using properly the alt and longdesc tags, and including pertinent captions for every photograph, is there anything else I can do to improve the site’s future listing in search engines?

posted at 08:39 am on November 08, 2005 by G Guzi