When we discuss accessibility, we cannot skip some extremely important factors, such as site structure, loading speed, page elements, etc. Let’s see what are the 5 most important development considerations that can influence the user experience and the availability of your website:
1. Domain name(and hosting company)
The good news: a good domain name can help you a lot in your marketing and your SEO efforts.
The bad news: finding a really good domain can be a challenging task.
The main point is to perfectly align your domain name with your target audience. Let me help you with a few tips:
try to find a domain name that contains highly relevant keywords to your niche
make it short – two words max – and memorable
make sure there is only one way to pronounce and spell it
avoid uncommon top-level domains; my recommendation: get a .com domain; other domains like .cc or .info often can trigger spam filters
if you are targeting a specific country use a domain from the corresponding national zone (.co.uk, .de, etc)
for multi-language sites it’s better to use separate domains for each language
try to avoid using hyphens in your domain name (hyphens often correlate with spammy websites); if you can’t avoid it, use only one hyphen max
make sure that all your sub-domains (and other variations) correctly point at the main site; sub-domains are often seen by search engines as separate domains, so usually it’s better to use subfolders
Here at WA we have a great hosting platform, but if you want to use another hosting company for your site, you’ll have to take the following factors into consideration:
access bandwidth
speed and performance
server reliability and uptime scores
security options
backup options
user-friendly control panel
server upgrading options
e-commerce features
email feature
amount of prepaid traffic
cost of traffic per gigabyte
renewal cost
refund policy
limitations
live support
2. Site content and architecture
A good site architecture leads to a great user experience and yes, to a great “search-engine-experience” too. While this part gets technical super fast, there are many simple things that everyone can take care of to improve accessibility and SEO rankings.
So, let’see some best practices:
Having more pages increases the visibility of the site to search engines.
Whenever you can, try to avoid sub-directories. With each new level you are going to bury your content deeper and deeper. Deep pages may be crawled less frequently, so the flatter your structure is, the better. And try to use keywords in your folder and sub-folder names.
Keep your navigation simple. The more menus and sub-menus you have, the harder to access it.
Every important page must be reachable from your homepage.
Make sure that the names of your URLs reflect your site’s structure. If is possible try to avoid using dynamic URLs.
Create a naturally flowing hierarchy without complex navigational structures.
Search engine visibility is increased as the amount of page text increases. The optimum page size is somewhere between 500 and 5,000 words.
Make sure that any prominent heading text throughout your website properly uses the h1 – h6 heading tags.
Don’t ever use Javascript to generate content or navigational elements! The components of a webpage can be created either at the server (before being sent to a browser) or after arriving at the browser. In the latter case a browser requests a page and included in the page is a Javascript code which will be executed by the browser. If the Javascript code is used to create a content piece or a navigational element, those won’t be created until the browser reads the Javascript code. The search engine bots won’t read and execute the Javascript code, therefore when a search engine will request the given page from the server, the content and/or the navigational elements won’t be created! These Javascript-based browser-side techniques basically will block search engines from accessing your pages. Similarly, the navigational elements created with Adobe Flash are also invisible for search engines (even at server side). If you really want to use these techniques, you’ll have to provide other ways for search engines to find their way through your website (for example, displaying regular text-links at the bottom of the page, a good sitemap, etc).
Avoid using frames to embed content from other sites. These HTML frames basically are entire (separate) websites or pages which are embedded into your web page and they can be very confusing for search engines.
And one more thing …
Use pagination! And use pagination techniques carefully!
If you have only a few pages and each subsequent page is visible (and clickable) in the pagination bar, than you shouldn’t face any indexing problems, but if you have too many pages and the pagination bar displays only a few initial and a few final pages, the in-between pages won’t be linked to from the main page, therefore they’ll be crawled less often by search engines!
In order to help search engines, you can link several pages together – and identify them as part of a larger set – by using the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link elements in the section.
Let’s assume, that you have a long piece of content separated into 3 pages:
yourdomain.com/page-1
yourdomain.com/page-2
yourdomain.com/page-3
If you want to tell search engines that these 3 pages belong together, you’ll have to use the rel=”next ” and rel= ” prev ” attributes.
In the <head> section of the first page you’ll have to include the following line (between “<” and “>” brackets):
link rel=’next’ href=’yourdomain.com/page-2′ /
On the second page you’ll have to use both attributes:
link rel=’prev’ href=’yourdomain.com/page-1′ /
link rel=’next’ href=’yourdomain.com/page-3′ /
And finally, on the third page:
link rel=’prev’ href=’yourdomain.com/page-2′ /
3. Images
Using images to enhance user experience is almost mandatory these days, but you should always keep in mind the following:
They are useful, but don’t use them excessively. Too many images can increase significantly the loading speed negatively impacting both user experience and SEO.
Use only commonly supported file formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF and BMP.
Always optimize your images for web in order to reduce the size of your image files as much as possible!
Use the alt tags to include a concise description of all of the images within your website. Give search engines some context on what the images on the page are related to. Avoid using too long alt texts that can be considered spammy.
Use short, descriptive filenames. Don’t ever use generic file names such as “image-1.jpeg” or “01.png”. Include the main keyword(s) in your image file name using a “-” (dash) character to separate the words.
Store all your images in dedicated directories and try to use as few sub-directories as you can to keep the image paths short and simple.
Always specify the exact dimensions for every single image (in your source code). When the web browser displays your page it has to figure out how to lay out the web page around your images. If it knows what size your images are, it can do it fast and easily, otherwise will be forced to rebuild the page every time when a new image appears. So, always specify the width and the height for every single image: img src=’image-name.jpeg’ width=’468′ height=’30’ /
Don’t forget to create an image sitemap!
4. Source code clutter
I admit, nowadays it’s probably not a truly vital factor. Still, if you are using custom CSS or any other custom code segments, having a clean, uncluttered source code will make it easier for the search engines to get to the important, keyword-rich content that must be indexed.
5. RSS feeds
We have already discussed: having an XML sitemap is a must. But, you can do even more if you want … For an optimal crawling and indexing you can use RSS feeds too, in order to notify search engines about any updates or new content you add to your website. These RSS feeds will help Google to keep your content fresher in its index. There are many handy RSS plugins out there.
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