E-mail List Archives

Search E-mail List Archives for

Number of posts in this thread: 8 (In chronological order)

From: Stephanie Sullivan
Date: Fri, Jan 21 2005 9:24AM
Subject: Can SEO and Accessibility coexist?
No previous message | Next message →

We've discussed alt attributes and what they're for and how to make them
accessible. And I try to build my sites that way. Enter the SEO
specialist... "Keywords must be used in alt elements and the first three
alts should have the most important keyword at least three times."

OK... Great.

So we give people garbledegook to listen to in order to get the search
engine spiders to see more value in our site so that it will send more
people over to use our site? Right.

Is there no way to balance those creepy crawly spiders with real human use?


Stephanie Sullivan
Community MX Partner :: http://www.communitymx.com/author.cfm?cid=1008
Team Macromedia for Dreamweaver :: http://tinyurl.com/6huw3
Co-Author .: "Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Magic" :. New Riders

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Fri, Jan 21 2005 10:04AM
Subject: Re: Can SEO and Accessibility coexist?
← Previous message | Next message →

> Is there no way to balance those creepy crawly spiders with real
> human use?

SEO 'consultants' are not usually of much worth. Why? Because SEO ranking is
rarely as important as people think it is. I put SEO consultants in the same
group as telemarketers and direct mail folks. Yea, it's maybe a viable tool
for marketing, but there are usually better, less annoying ways to target
your audience.

Personally, I find good accessibility practice the key to good SEO
spiderability. Smart search engines, like Google, are constantly changing
their algorhythms anyways to stump the next SEO consultant's bag of tricks,
anyways, so stick with a good, clean, accessible site and know that it is
not only more readable to humans, but more readable to google-bot.

-Darrel

From: Rowan
Date: Fri, Jan 21 2005 10:19AM
Subject: Re: Can SEO and Accessibility coexist?
← Previous message | Next message →

Sounds to me like you need to hire an SEO who's methods have moved on since
1998. The better companies are preaching usability, accessibility and
quality content as a route to better rankings and more conversions. Find one
of those and you should find an SEO who you can relate to.

Yes, compromises need to be made, but it shouldn't be the either/or scenario
you've mentioned.



We've discussed alt attributes and what they're for and how to make them
accessible. And I try to build my sites that way. Enter the SEO
specialist... "Keywords must be used in alt elements and the first three
alts should have the most important keyword at least three times."

From: Michael Moore
Date: Fri, Jan 21 2005 10:57AM
Subject: Re: Can SEO and Accessibility coexist?
← Previous message | Next message →

The problem is that SEO specialists are attempting to manipulate the
search engines rather than allowing them to do their jobs. As to the
use of alts to manipulate search engines - the search engine designers
will soon discover this ploy and will ignore keywords in alts just as
they do in the meta-data. As SEO's continue to discover new ways to
manipulate the search engines we all suffer. Our searches return less
useful results and we are encouraged to compromise our principles and
make pages less accessible and usable but more "attractive" to spiders.

The search engine is trying to identify the document that contains
information that is meaningful in terms of the search string. If your
image is meaningful in terms of the search string then the alt will
naturally reflect that. For example, if I am searching for flying
widgets and there is a picture on your page of a flying widget with an
alt that says "flying widget" along with perhaps an h1 heading that says
"Bonzo Company releases its latest flying widget" followed by an article
about bonzo company's flying widget then the page works for everyone.

If however I am searching for a page on accessible web design and the
alt of the flying widget says "accessible design widget flying web
......" and we have equally misleading strings in the page title, key
words, etc, well you get my point.

I firmly believe that is is unethical and ultimately unwise to attempt
to manipulate the search engines. Design your pages well, design for
accessibility, and design to allow the search engines to do their job
well not just drive traffic to your site. Its not the number of visits
to your site thats important, its the number of visits by people who
were really looking for what is there that is important.

design wrote:
> We've discussed alt attributes and what they're for and how to make them
> accessible. And I try to build my sites that way. Enter the SEO
> specialist... "Keywords must be used in alt elements and the first three
> alts should have the most important keyword at least three times."
>
> OK... Great.
>
> So we give people garbledegook to listen to in order to get the search
> engine spiders to see more value in our site so that it will send more
> people over to use our site? Right.
>
> Is there no way to balance those creepy crawly spiders with real human use?
>
>
> Stephanie Sullivan
> Community MX Partner :: http://www.communitymx.com/author.cfm?cid=1008
> Team Macromedia for Dreamweaver :: http://tinyurl.com/6huw3
> Co-Author .: "Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Magic" :. New Riders
>
>

From: Stephanie Sullivan
Date: Fri, Jan 21 2005 12:21PM
Subject: Re: Can SEO and Accessibility coexist?
← Previous message | Next message →

On 1/21/05 12:55 PM, "mmoore" simply typed the following:

> The problem is that SEO specialists are attempting to manipulate the
> search engines rather than allowing them to do their jobs. As to the
> use of alts to manipulate search engines - the search engine designers
> will soon discover this ploy and will ignore keywords in alts just as
> they do in the meta-data. As SEO's continue to discover new ways to
> manipulate the search engines we all suffer. Our searches return less
> useful results and we are encouraged to compromise our principles and
> make pages less accessible and usable but more "attractive" to spiders.

I completely agree with your entire post and it is my thinking as well. BUT
-- in many cases, the client doesn't care that we're being ethical. They
want to be at the top of the search results... :-| It's the "everybodies'
doing it" thing... If what the SEOs are doing to manipulate is working, then
I have clients that want to be manipulated, you know? It's the old, "if you
can't fight 'em, join 'em" thing... And they hire SEO people that come in
and tell me what should happen, or do it themselves.

That said, I have seen a case where a client (I did NOT build or design his
current site) has a fully graphical site. Even the text is a graphic. He
used alt attributes to rewrite ALL the text that's in the graphics so it
would be picked up... He thought. But it didn

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Fri, Jan 21 2005 1:11PM
Subject: Re: Can SEO and Accessibility coexist?
← Previous message | Next message →

> I completely agree with your entire post and it is my thinking as
> well. BUT -- in many cases, the client doesn't care that we're being
> ethical. They want to be at the top of the search results... :-|

I always push back on the client. Rarely is this actually that important. If
a client is really that dependant on their business being in the top ten of
google results, then their business model probably isn't very viable.

If they are REALLY that concerned, well, that's what google ads are for.

> But how do you convince the client that
> it's mor important to be accessible than to use the techniques people
> are employing to raise rank (and these are white hat techniques...
> They will not get you banned)? And who pays the bills? :-(

Get them to think seriously about the whole search engine thing. Point out
that being listed on a few key topic-centric directories will likely lead
more traffic their way than random searches on google.

-Darrel

From: Stephanie Sullivan
Date: Fri, Jan 21 2005 3:20PM
Subject: Re: Can SEO and Accessibility coexist?
← Previous message | Next message →

On 1/21/05 3:10 PM, "darrel.austin" simply typed the following:

> If they are REALLY that concerned, well, that's what google ads are for.

Thumbs up... I've done that discussion... ;) Haven't fully convinced him
yet (because of the cost associated with his industry) but I haven't given
up yet. ;) Thanks for your input... I needed a vent today.

Stephanie Sullivan
Community MX Partner :: http://www.communitymx.com/author.cfm?cid=1008
Team Macromedia for Dreamweaver :: http://tinyurl.com/6huw3
Co-Author .: "Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Magic" :. New Riders
VioletSky Design :: http://www.violetsky.net

"Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a
thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved." -William Jennings
Bryan

From: Terry Brainerd Chadwick
Date: Fri, Jan 21 2005 4:52PM
Subject: Re: Can SEO and Accessibility coexist?
← Previous message | No next message

At 11:22 AM 1/21/2005 -0500, design wrote:

>We've discussed alt attributes and what they're for and how to make them
>accessible. And I try to build my sites that way. Enter the SEO
>specialist... "Keywords must be used in alt elements and the first three
>alts should have the most important keyword at least three times."

Disclaimer: I'm a search engine optimization specialist.

I don't know your SEO specialist is, but fire him/her! No ethical SEO
specialist would say that.

A good search engine optimization specialist is going to make sure that a
site has valid code and content, and that means using Alt attributes correctly.

What your SEO specialist should have said is that you should include
important keywords within your Alt text where relevant. Which makes sense
because people are trying to make sure that the page they are reading is
relevant to them and they want to see the keywords they searched for in the
content on the page. An image should be relevant to the page. If it is,
then the short explanation of the meaning of the image that goes into the
Alt attribute ought to be able to contain relevant keywords.

You should definitely not repeat a keyword at least three times anywhere on
a page. That's called spamming and can get your site penalized. You should
also not keyword stuff a transparent image, check mark, or anything else
that you would normally use a empty alt attribute, alt="", for. That also
is spamming.

BTW, there is a very good reason for SEO if search engines form even a
portion of your traffic. Or if you want to get traffic from people who look
for products and services through search engines. About 70% of people using
search engines click only on the organic (non-paid) listings, and few of
them look further than the first 30 or so results.

In fact good SEO can help accessibility, particularly in those cases where
it is difficult to monetize accessibility efforts. (You know, the old "we
don't have any blind users" excuse.)

A lot of sites, especially those using a lot of JavaScript, Flash, and the
like, can't be indexed by search engines. They can'be be read by screen
readers either. I spend a lot of my time making sure that the web sites I
work on have visible links and content that can be read humans regardless
of ability, screen readers, spiders, etc.

Generally an accessible site is very search engine friendly. Tell that to
your SEO specialist. Accessible sites use plain text for content, clearly
identify links and make sure the links have good descriptions, have good
descriptive titles, headings, and alt text. Accessible sites provide text
alternatives for PDFs, audio files, Flash, etc. And all of that is great
for search engines.

Terry Brainerd Chadwick
Search Marketing, Accessibility, and Overall Website Performance Specialist
http://www.tbchad.com