Accessibility – Crucial for Search Engine Success

Webmasters who spend thousands of dollars to optimize their websites for search engines and for online promotion surprisingly overlook the importance of making their website accessible. This will not only affect the human users from visiting your website, it will also block the search engine spiders from accessing your website and crawl your website completely. Some of the very common and major accessibility issues can be discussed below.

The first accessibility issue is broken links. If the links in your website do not land in an active page or if it is not linked at all, it can lead to serious problems. Broken links will pull your rankings down drastically. So it will not only make the page supposed to be linked invisible but it will affect the over all ranking of the website. Before launching your site, you must make sure all the links are working and as soon as you upload the site to your server, you must again check all the links for their continuity.

The second area that creates accessibility issues is invalid HTML and CSS. You must make sure to run a validation test for your HTML and CSS files and it must meet the standards of W3C. Search engine spiders detest invalid HTML and CSS. So make sure to get help from the right resources to validate your HTML and CSS coding.

The third area is the site loading time. If you use heavy files on your webpage then your website will take a long time to load and search engine spiders normally do not like files that are too heavy. The ideal size of your web page should be less than 150 KB. Web pages that are huge in terms of file size may not be readily cached. As search engines try to keep their index size to an optimum limit large files may be ignored. They need to do this to ensure fast retrieval of data when a search query is passed. If you want deep crawling for your website then you must work with your file size of each page. You can always add second page with a “More” link wherever possible. When the file size is huge human visitors too may get frustrated and you may lose a considerable amount of traffic owing to this issue.

Another important area is web forms that you use in your website. Whenever you have a web form make sure the form lands in an active page when the form is submitted. This means you need to test the form as soon as you upload your website to the server. It is not enough to check it offline during the development phase.

Server downtime is another obvious accessibility issue, which is really not under your control. However, you can select a good hosting company to host your website and don’t make your decision just based on the cost factor. You must also find a reliable company because whether you like it or not, it is the basket where all your eggs are laid, mistakes in this area can cost you a great deal.

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