SEO Step By Step Guide–26.Accessibility Issues

When you have taken care of all your on-page optimization efforts, you must concentrate your website accessibility limitations. The whole idea of search engine optimization is to make your website more search engine friendly. At times we may overlook some of the very obvious factors, which will stop the search engines from accessing our website freely. Often when this happens, human visitors too may not be able to access our website. For a complete crawling of your website, proper indexing and for good traffic, your website should be made freely accessible.

One of the factors that irritate both search engine bots and human visitors is broken links. There is no use linking to a page that is not alive. All the links should have an active page linked to it and it should be the correct page. All your SEO efforts may turnout to be futile if you fail to make this basic check on your website for broken links. You will end up losing your ranking unnecessarily in the search engines for a mistake, which could have been easily corrected with timely checking. It is not enough to validate each link before the launch. You must revalidate all the links to see how they are performing when they are actually online.

Web pages that are too heavy can also cause accessibility problems. It is advised that your web pages should be 150kb or less. This does not include the image files that you will call from a different location. Search engines are afraid of web pages that take a long time to load. Because this is a clear indication of a large sized page. Search engines try to avoid pages that are too large to ensure that its index size is within manageable limits. They need to keep a close tab on this because when there are too many heavy files, it can slow down the search engine in fetching the right information.

It is not a bad idea to overflow to a second page when you have too much of data on a single page. A simple “More…” link will save you from most of the problems regarding the page size.

Another area that affects the accessibility of your website is invalid HTML codes and CSS files. It is important that your websites HTML and CSS coding comply with W3C. If you want a sure way of chasing away the search engine bots, then keep your HTML codes shabby.

If you have a number of forms in your website, make sure to test them when the site is live online. Make sure that on submission each form lands in the page you want them to land. Checking your forms in advance will save you from a lot of trouble. If the forms are not properly coded, they may result in wrong landing pages or page not found error.

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