Web Designers not needed! SEO tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the latest skill being picked up by many web designers and website owners alike.

Web designers realise it's not enough to develop a well presented, functional, useable website - but it's also important to make it as 'visible' as possible to search engines using SEO. Unfortunately, many web designers have muddied the waters by saying SEO is some kind of 'black art' - too difficult to learn for your average layman - possibly for the reason to make sure your average layman keeps paying the web designer to do it for him!

The truth is SEO really is quite easy, and the rules are transparent and not hard to understand. It does require TIME though - time to carefully consider your SEO strategy, and then actually do it. This is why web designers charge a lot for SEO - because it takes time, patience and perseverance.

There are two areas to consider when optimizing your website for search engines:-

1. Trusted inbound Links (sites that link to your site)
2. Content on your website

The first step : Trusted inbound links >>>>

Accessibility

An accessible website can be navigated without a mouse, with all of its images able to be read by screen readers (for the blind) - among a number of other guidelines.

Accessibility also concerns itself with browsers - a website can be inaccessible to everyone using an older browser, for example - because it was created with 'broken', invalid HTML that older browsers cannot render (newer browsers tend to be more forgiving).

The first step to developing an accessible site is to use valid HTML/XHTML. This gives you a starting point that at least ensures all of the images have text descriptions, and that the HTML should render OK in older browsers (there's still no absolute guarantee though, with the variances between the browser versions).

This first step does not give you an accessible website.

puresilva websites have been designed to be as accessible as possible in terms of having valid HTML and clear layout - with default settings giving contrasting font colours and backgrounds, as well as users being able to change font sizes and TAB between navigation.

However, content is a big part of accessibility. If your target market is Japan, yet you write your website only in English, you will be making your site inaccessible to all of your website visitors who cannot read English. This exaggerated example highlights how important content is in terms of accessibility. According to usablenet.com, content should be:-

"presented in a clear and simple manner, and should provide understandable mechanisms to navigate within and between pages."

The puresilva templated versions receive free updates, so these will be kept up-to-date with all the latest accessibility guidelines.

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