One of the most important aspects of website design is its accessibility in search engines. There is a number of ways that make a website highly accessible over search engines. Web accessibility guidelines go hand-in-hand with website development. Here are 9 quick ways to lookout while designing your website to make it more accessible to search engines.
Meaningful Page Titles
The page title is the first thing that renders after the web page fully loads. Do not ever keep them the same in all your web pages, this will make it difficult for the user to determine which page they are on.
Always keep your page titles meaningful for users to interact with.
Use of Heading Tags
Heading tags on a webpage is an outline of the webpage content. Breaking a long webpage into logical sub-headings is always a good idea to help the user understand the topic more clearly.
Label form elements
Web forms are the primary way to interact with any website. Using correct HTML mark-up is crucial to maintain a universal design.
Label all your input elements meaningfully with descriptive texts so as to make it easier for a user to understand what information they should be providing.
Check WebPages with CSS and JS disabled
The simplest way to check if your website is access-friendly is by turning off CSS and JS. CSS helps you position elements whereas JS will help you in hiding and removing them.
Checking the website keeping CSS and JS disabled will allow you to see if your website is accessible or not. This testing parameter will confirm that your website is optimized for easy access.
Add Transcripts for Video and Audio Media
If you are using a video or audio clip on the website, you should understand that bots can identify them but they can’t crawl for content, but if you provide written text transcripts for video and audio clips that will help bots to identify where to show the website in search results. Users will find it easy to navigate and access the information they are looking for.
Make PDFs Accessible with OCR
OCR (Optical character recognition) helps to crawl uncrawlable files like PDFs into crawlable text. The benefit is that OCR makes it searchable and helps users find relevant information. If you have a lot of PDFs in place, you do not want to lose out on the opportunity to rank well for the content.
List your Business at Google
Listing your business with Google will help you appear in relevant geographical search results. It helps you rank well locally and gain more exposure. And if your customers place positive reviews for you that will even add more benefits to it.
Use Image Alt Tags
Image alt tags act as the replacement for the image when they fail to load, however, these tags are also accessed to reach the images. The objective of these tags is to describe the image to provide more information to the users.
An accessible website is highly important for any business. It can risk you to connect with your target audience. Contact us; we make websites that are search engine friendly and easily accessible.