SEO and Accessibility

MARK WALKER:
Hello, everybody, I’m Mark Walker. This webinar is about SEO and accessibility. I'm just making sure you are all in the right place. We have got over 40 people already logged in. We will go through the introductions fairly slowly and be ready for when the majority of people are here.

If there is anybody who has any particular accessibility needs, please let us know by email if you have any requests or problems.

We also do have live captions available. You have to go on a different screen to do that, through a browser. You go to www.ai-live.com and you use a session code, which is SEOA2606A. I can send that to anybody who requests it via text.

We do monthly talks, workshops and webinars around accessibility. Today, we're looking at search engine optimisation. How can ensuring the accessibility of your website improve your SEO performance?

We will be talking to an expert, Gerry White and our own resident expert Robin Christopherson will be talking about accessibility. We are looking for top tips and we are particularly interested in your questions about SEO and accessibility, whether you are coming from an SEO perspective or an accessibility perspective. There is a lot of common ground and we’re interested in exploring that.

If you have questions, there is a question panel on the control panel. My first question is, can you hear me? I would be grateful if you could use the questions panel to let me know if you can hear me. Stuart Ellis, straight in there.

There is also a chat box that you can use to directly ask me questions.

Thank you to everyone who has replied. Clearly it is working. 

Let me introduce the panel. There are three of us. Robin Christopherson. Hello, Robin.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Hello there.

MARK WALKER:
Gerry, are you there?

GERRY WHITE:
Yes, I am here.

MARK WALKER:
I will be guiding us through the session and asking questions to the other two guys as we go along about SEO and accessibility.

For those of you who don't know or haven't come across AbilityNet, we are a charity based in the UK and we provide a range of different services for disabled people. We are particularly interested in helping disabled people use technology at home, at work or in education.

This particular part of the business is about web accessibility. We generate income from the sales of services to pay for our free services. We do accessibility testing and design reviews. We have some labs in London where we do user testing.

We have a wide range of global businesses, including Samsung and BT. One of the proudest things we have done is the testing for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics websites.

Today, we have a guest from SiteVisibility. Gerry, could you tell us a bit about SiteVisibility and your services?

GERRY WHITE:
SiteVisibility is a SEO content marketing, Google Analytics, paid search, and social media marketing agency. We used to run Brighton SEO, a big SEO conference that was very popular throughout the UK. We also have our own Internet marketing podcast.

MARK WALKER:
What is your position there?

GERRY WHITE:
My official job title is technical SEO director. 

MARK WALKER:
You obviously mentioned, when we were talking earlier in preparation, some of the work you have done before. Could you mention a bit about your history in terms of jobs?

GERRY WHITE:
I have been a contractor to a consultant for a number of years, including at the BBC where I was working on the homepage in search operations. I have been working for the government on direct.gov and a number of major projects there. A number of other major ecommerce clients, so I have got around quite a lot.

MARK WALKER:
OK, cool. Glad to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Someone has just asked if we can access the recording. They are recording the audio as we go along. We have a video and a transcript available at the end. The video will be available sometime today, the transcript takes a bit longer to complete. But there will be a link we can share afterwards.

First question, what do we mean by accessibility? We will talk about SEO and accessibility and the common ground they share. Just to be clear when we talk about accessibility, when we use the term 'digital accessibility'’, it is ranging across websites, digital services and devices.

Robin, you are the head of digital inclusion at AbilityNet. When people ask you about the business case for accessibility, what do you say about why we're doing it?

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
It has all been a very compelling business case. It has been a legal requirement since 1999 when the DDA first came out. What we found most recently is that because of mobile, in particular, there is a huge overlap where accessibility makes great business sense for every single user.

To give an example, someone like myself - who can't see - relies on things coded in a certain way so they are friendly to my speech output software, my screen reading software.

Increasingly, people who are driving and need to use their phones hands-free will be using speech enabled apps, so they are temporarily disabled. They might want to be able to send a text, so they might use voice recognition, which is another alternative that relies on the accessibility of the product.

If you have a small mobile screen on a bright, sunny day and you have two minutes to use an app or a mobile version of a website to buy a gift for someone, if it hasn't got decent text size or a good legible font, if the colour contrast makes it difficult to see, you are temporarily visually impaired while you are trying to buy that gift. That is the same for a visually impaired person 24/7.

So the business case isn’t just for disabled people, even though there are 11.5 million people with Disabilities in the UK, that’s with a capital ‘D’ and millions more with dyslexia and age-related impairments. If you look at the average income, they have got around £10,000 homes per disabled person of disposable income and that equates to $100 billion of disposable income for that sector. It is a very compelling case.

Now people are aware that complying with accessibility criteria makes your apps or websites more useful for everyone, so everyone is sitting up and taking notice. In case you are wondering how SEO relates to mobile apps, for example, you have probably heard about how difficult it is to get visibility in the app store, where there are nearly a billion apps in the Apple app store, for example, and the search engine is arcane to say the least. You have to be incredibly savvy about how you make your app more visible in that quite tough environment with these other competing apps.

MARK WALKER:
Thank you.

Gerry, when people ask you, what do we mean by search engine optimisation, how'd you explain the technicalities and the purpose of it?

GERRY WHITE:
There are two elements. One is to make sure you are featured on the search engines. This includes all search engines, from Google to Bing.

We also talk about social search engines, such as the Twitter search. But mainly, we talk about Google. When we talk about being on the search engines that mean that Google can find all your content, it indexes it all. We talk about the visibility of it - if somebody types in a query related to your business, making sure you come up. One of the facts is that people very rarely look beyond the first page.

The other thing is making sure your website actually does exactly what it is supposed to. So if you come through to the website, if you are presented with the right page. It is not just the website, but the right parts of the website and the right pages being featured on the search engine.

MARK WALKER:
Thank you. You're a marketing company in the sense of the work you are doing with people. To what extent is accessibility part of your thinking already? In terms of your previous work, was it something you knew a lot about?

GERRY WHITE:
I don't know nearly as much as I would like to. That is something we have always talked about. We have tried to listen and make sure we do it right. We do try to make sure the pages are correctly set out. We do try to make sure there is nothing that will stop it working well.

But generally it is not something that we have paid as much attention to as we probably should have done, because it is not something the clients have asked for.

MARK WALKER:
It is really helpful to have you here and it's good to know that we are not pretending this is some great industry that everybody knows everything about. It is great to share knowledge and then learn across those two areas.

We have obviously had some chat about this. We have picked out three areas of good practice. We will talk about those in a moment. We have picked a couple of examples that we think are bad practice that demonstrate potential problems.

The good practice relates to editorial quality, alt-text, good link text and making multimedia content accessible. The bad practice is to do it with hidden text and doorway pages.

I will ask you, Robin, to take a lead on this good practice stuff. Can you tell us why good quality content and editorial quality is so important for accessibility? Then we will hear from Gerry about how that crosses over into SEO.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
On the next slide, you will see editorial quality. This is probably the single most important area when it comes to SEO. I am sure Gerry will agree. It has a very significant impact on people with different disabilities.

This is talking about clear, legible, concise, readable, logical content. Editorial content. Words, the language that you use. I am sure you would appreciate that for the millions of people with dyslexia and reading difficulties, the more concise your text can be, the more to the point, the more understandable and applicable and appropriate, the better for people with different disabilities.

You don't want to be wading through lots of verbose text if you have a vision impairment or dyslexia. I think I’m right, Gerry, that the rule of thumb is to take copy from the printed page to the web is to cut it in half, to cut it down to the essence. Would you agree with that?

GERRY WHITE:
Absolutely. The screen is typically at a lower resolution than the printed page used to be. And people scan read so much so they’re not going to read through it and the back button is so much easier to click than ever before.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Tell us about how important the quality of the editorial is, the language and the words, to SEO and getting your website up and onto page one?

GERRY WHITE:
The current trend in SEO is much more content based than ever before. We talk to clients about something called content marketing; if we build you great content, people are going to come and find it and Google will see the fact that it’s great content. Poor content just does not perform. People don't link to it, people don't like it, so you don't get anywhere near as good results.

Again, critically talking about the keyword focus, if you are not using the language that your users are searching with, people will never find you. Google is very clever at understanding that Starbucks, for instance is, is a type of coffee and all that sort of information, but it is not perfect. You need to understand that if your users are talking about something in one language and you are using a buzzword for it, they will never find you.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Brilliant. So, and FAQ page is vital, isn’t it, because if people are searching on terms that occur to them, questions they might have about your organisation, then an FAQ page is the logical and sensible place to put a whole list of questions and answers. That is an SEO trap, isn't it?

GERRY WHITE:
The problem with FAQ pages is that it’s often a long page with lots of different questions. You often search, and if it is not as the top, you will go straight back again. Google has changed its algorithm to say that what it wants to do is to answer questions. This is called the Hummingbird update. If somebody is searching for a particular query, they are not really looking for the keywords within that query. What they’re actually looking to do is answer a particular enquiry. They are looking for information or to buy something.

Google has tried to interpret that. So if you’re trying to answer a questions, that is exactly what Google likes and exactly the kind of content that tends to perform much better on search engines.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
So with something like an FAQ page, just like we’ve been talking about with other content, if you can keep it short and sweet, not have a huge amount of scrolling, try and keep things as concise as possible, that will be really helpful.

GERRY WHITE

Absolutely, yeah.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON

Let's talk about page titles, which you said were probably the most important aspect of copy when it comes to the editorial consideration for SEO.

GERRY WHITE:
Absolutely. Page titles are one of the most valued parts of the page in the Google algorithm and it is what people click on when they see the results. If the page title just says home, or untitled, or it is something completely inappropriate to the page you’re clicking through to, you won't get the traffic, and you will not get the rankings either. It is absolutely vital to use the best title you can in the title tag.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Great, so: it should be unique to each page, it should perhaps have a dash, and then, perhaps, the name of the website as a whole for the second half of the page title, for example. So for people that aren’t aware, this is the title attribute in the header information. It doesn’t appear on the page it comes up in the title, the blue bar at the top of the browser. It features very largely in the search result listing.

So, let's talk about hierarchy of semantic content because from an accessibility point of view it’s vital for you to have one H1 on a page. It is at the main header of the page. It should be similar to the page title and should summarise what you can expect on that page, the main topic. Beneath that, you should have a logical child system of H2s that tells you the next important level of headings. After that it H3s and H4s. But Google doesn’t pay as much attention to hierarchy of headings as much as the fact that there are headings there.

GERRY WHITE:
Absolutely. Google classically did pay more attention, we believe, but we never know exactly how Google does it, so I might say something and someone else might say something entirely different. We don't know exactly what is inside the black box at Google. Our research suggests that it does not pay attention to the hierarchy but it does pay attention to a H1 and sometimes it’ll take the H1 you’ve got on the page and put it as the title in the search results. It does pay attention to those tags, but it doesn't necessarily care if you’ve got multiple H1s and H2s in the wrong place.

One really bad example that we have talked about is that, on a lot of those websites, the cookie statement is actually a H1, so if people did pay attention to these, it would cause us a lot more problems. So, basically, the reason Google doesn't pay attention to them because of the abuse that we - when I say we, I mean people who created the content - practiced for so long.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Exactly, and if you don't have good titles, you just have 'home', Google might go looking elsewhere to replace the search result with the H1 because it thinks it is more informative. So if you haven’t got a decent H1 you might end up with a rubbish page title in your search results.

So we’ll talk about editorial nasties later on but right we will finish off with keywords. What are the best ways to use keywords? So this is slightly different to making all of your language is as concise and applicable as possible. What can you say about specific keywords?

GERRY WHITE:
We try to work out the keywords people searched for. If we put the keyword in the title tag, H1 or somewhere significant in the body, that page does tend to form better with that keyword.

We are currently rewriting a lot of the H1s, title tags and description tags for clients because they are just not doing it. For instance, if they have a location in London, they are putting ‘brand name – London’, rather than ‘brand name – London’ and then the services that they offer. For example, if it was a TV studio, they would put… I can't think of a TV studio, but ‘brand name – London’. They wouldn't actually include the phrase 'TV studio.'

The problem with doing this is that Google has come along and said, other people have learned this and are stuffing the keyword in every place possible. It is surprising that when we read through text, they have tried to put a keyword phrase in every single sentence, as often as they can. That is really bad for SEO. The best practice is to use them, use them in the tags, use them in the main title of the page and, where appropriate, in the body.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Yes, that is really interesting. Things that people used to do are now backfiring. It is important to be current in what advice and research you are doing on SEO, as it is a movable area.

Let's talk about alt-tags, if we go to the next slide. This is a really important area of SEO and accessibility and, again, as a blind person, but it is equally true of anyone looking at the image, having a text description of the image, particularly when it includes words, is really important. Dyslexic people, for example, might hover the mouse over a paragraph of text or a link. There is some software that will read out that paragraph for them. On many websites, the headings are pictures of words and it doesn't speak that out because there is no alternative text available. For someone like myself, who relies on speech output, I am lost.

Let's talk briefly about alternate text. What is the top advice you can give about best practice when it comes to providing alternate text on someone's site?

GERRY WHITE:
I think the best advice at the moment is to treat it as an accessibility thing, rather than an SEO thing. One of the things we have seen, for instance, is display adverts, the banner adverts that we have seen on websites. Sometimes these put in the size and dimensions in the name, which is completely unhelpful in terms of SEO and screen readers. So basically it’s understanding what the image really is. It will be treated as part of the text so you need to make sure you put the best text in there regarding accessibility and SEO.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Great. What about links? What about the content of those? They could be image links, in which case they need alternative text. Or they could be ‘Click here’ or ‘More’, which we see quite often. The accessibility consideration there is that someone like myself, a screen reader user, I put all of the links on a page in a great big list, rather than just having to tab through. When they are put in a list like that, I need them to make sense. If they just say 'Click here' or 'More', because they’re taken out of context, I have no idea where those links go, it doesn't help me. So what’s the best practice or downsides for SEO?

GERRY WHITE:
'Click here' is a great example. If you do a Google search for 'Click here', the top result is Adobe’s PDF reader because so many people have used the link text ‘Click here’ to go to to the PDF reader that Google actually thinks that page is about 'Click here'.

Google will take into consideration, not just the on page content, but how people are clicking onto it. Classically you could do something called a Google-bomb, so if everybody links to a certain page for a certain piece of text, even if the text is not on that page, you get it ranking for that page.

Google have decided we can't do that any more. If you link to any page, you have to link to it appropriately because you are telling Google what that page is about. It is not just the type of tags and the descriptions and the content on that page, it’s also all the other links going into it. ‘Click here’ is a really bad for SEO.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Brilliant. You were telling us about a search you can do where there’s no title attributes.

GERRY WHITE:
I'm trying to remember it. Which one was that?

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Untitled page.

GERRY WHITE:
Yes, that is another one. Dreamweaver was the most popular program to make websites for a long time. The last thing you do, is put the title on there and it’s amazing how many people forgot to do it. So there are so many pages now with the title ‘Untitled Document’. It is really quite scary.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Yes, if you want to see some legacy pages created from Dreamweaver, type in "Untitled Document" into Google.

Onto the next slide. This is actually an e-marketing email that Mark got the other day. This is particularly relevant as it is an email, it is not search engine visible, though they are often web versions of theses, but because it comes into your inbox and a lot of email clients have stripped out images for security reasons, this is how Mark saw it.

The image hadn't loaded yet. What was it, Mark? A big, red box?

MARK WALKER:
Yes, it appeared as a big, red box. It is actually a lovely picture of a chameleon. It is for a CRM company.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Brilliant. So because there was no alternative text and it was not indexable, for Mark - who has images stripped out - he would not get any information at all without clicking on it and downloading the image, which many people don't bother to do. Perhaps they are even barred by the security settings of their email client.

On mobile browsers, mobile browsers often don’t immediately download images by default because of bandwidth considerations as well as security. So anyone who got this email or visited the page online, or anywhere that there was not alternative text for images, they would get nothing.

So it is now a mainstream issue in terms of not everyone is going to be getting graphical content. They do not get this information by default.

GERRY WHITE:
Yes, so many users now use Gmail. We get so many emails every day. I saw something come through, but if I search for it and it is not in email, I have actually lost it. Searching your inbox for keywords is actually still key as well. Though you would not consider Gmail to be a search engine, I do regularly search through my emails to find related email for something - something I want to buy, something I wanted to go to that I had registered for. You can optimise them to search.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Absolutely. Another worrying development is Twitter, as they have piloted a new re-tweet system, which would allow people to have the full 140 characters and to append the tweet as an image, as a picture of the text of the original tweet. I guarantee there will not be alternative text as an example that is not how it works for Twitter. That is the end of the story. Working within the parameters of what they've got, and believe me, every third tweet that I receive is lost on me already, but now I have the prospect of losing threads as well as people's re-tweet, and I don't get the original image.

Because Twitter is an online resource, the SEO for all of those re-tweeted tweets has disappeared as well.

MARK WALKER:
Yes, and making sure that is readable. It is a big crossover with the SEO stuff. Don't just take it as a logo, you must try and make it relevant to the screen reader. That is going to work for SEO as well.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Yes, this did quite happily fill a whole webinar. Go and have a look back for more of an in-depth discussion on that.

If we go back to multimedia, there is still a lot of multimedia content embedded within the website. A lot of it is embedded YouTube videos for content provided in a different player, or perhaps it is Flash content when it comes to marketing, advertising or perhaps in some cases functionality.

This is a big challenge when it comes to accessibility. We have done a webinar on this. Multimedia content is often very challenging from an accessibility point of view. There are guidelines about to make sure your multimedia content is accessible.

Let's just hear from Gerry about the SEO angle of multimedia and what the challenges are there.

GERRY WHITE:
Google loves a video. You can mark up with search engines and map it to say: this is a video, this is what it looks like and in Google search results, will show a box to show you it is a video.

But they can't see within the video, so if you have a lot of content in the video, for instance a cooking video, but is only in the video, people will not find the information within it, unless you do things like creating transcripts and put in the transcript on the same page as the video.

We were talking about this and wondering if there was a way of doing it to mean that it would not be hidden from a search engine point of view. Also, Google can see the hidden debts. It is not going to rank it particularly well. It says, I can't see this content, so users are not going to see this content. You basically have to make sure it is within an area on the page that is maybe scrollable. Just to make sure the content you want to be known for is actually on the page.

Long-term, it is really, really important. If you are doing a recipe, you have to make sure the elements you want are definitely in the text on that page if you want it to come up on the search engine.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Absolutely. We have an example on the next slide.

MARK WALKER:
We will be asking for some top tips here. This is an example of something we are doing that maybe you could comment on. We did an interview last week with Jimmy Wales, the inventor of Wikipedia. We're giving him the Tech4Good award, which is something that we run. This is big news for us. We have a video of him being interviewed and we were trying to work out, in the context of this SEO stuff, what we would do.

We have got a transcript of the video, so we could post that, but from what you are saying, it would be better for that not to be in a separate page, but for it to be actually on the page. Is that the dream ticket, to have both on the page?

GERRY WHITE:
Absolutely. If it was on a separate page, you are losing from an SEO point of view, the power of having one page about one subject with all the content. If there is a way of making it so that it is within what we call a gif, that is totally accessible. To my knowledge, there are no accessibility issues there. Visually, it looks like a smaller box on the page, rather than taking up the entire page, several will not have any real impact.

MARK WALKER:
What about the YouTube description? Should we be putting transcripts into YouTube? Would that be a bonus? At the moment, we just put links.

GERRY WHITE:
When we are optimising videos, we tend to put quite a long description. Not necessarily a verbatim transcript. It is amazing how often, when we read through the transcripts, it almost doesn't make sense when you just read it through. We edit it slightly to get the point out a bit more and put those on YouTube. We know these videos will then come up a lot better.

You Tube is just another massive search engine. There are so many videos being put on YouTube every hour. You have to treat it like a search engine and make sure the content is optimised in the same way that you would for a web page.

MARK WALKER:
From an accessibility point of view, I know YouTube is not great for accessibility for some purposes.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
It is certainly not the worst multimedia player out there. There are better ones as well. That is a really good example of why having redundancy, which is alternative options, is really great. If you could have subtitles for your video, that would be the preferred choice for people with a hearing impediment. We would definitely advocate doing that. Also, because you have got the transcript, make that available as well, because the captions within the video are not indexable, they are not searchable.

You have to tag your video by the one who uploaded it and give lots of keywords to make sure it is searchable within YouTube. But having a transcript makes the whole content of the video available. For somebody who is deaf blind, for example, or perhaps someone like myself who cannot see, it would perhaps go straight to the transcript, because you can read through that at 400 words a minute, like my screen reader does and get it much more quickly. Or you can search through that text, because it is indexable and searchable.

That is a really good example. What Gerry was saying a moment ago would be useful for people for whom scrolling is an issue, this ability to hide part of the text is a good lead into the final part of our topic. It is the most enjoyable from my point of view, as it is a chance to vent at people who have spent years hiding content.

Hidden text and doorway pages. We have talked about good editorial copy and we have touched upon the fact that text can be hidden in certain ways, either using various methods that Gerry is going to outline in a minute or talking about having nasty pixels or images on the page that have horrendous alternative text that are bloated beyond all reason to include lots of text to try to gain the search engines. Tell us a bit about that and whether it is something that is now as prevalent as it was.

GERRY WHITE:
When we were talking through this and we were talking about some of the bad practices, it still goes on. It has not disappeared at all. We found webpages where we found a lot of text in the source code and we look on the page and we cannot see it. That is not uncommon at all.

Often these boxes are actually marked as SEO text. We have seen it when it is hidden on the screen, saying: this is a box which is 400 pixels to the right-hand side of the screen. On a normal screen, you cannot see it. Unfortunately, screen readers can. This text is totally indexable so Google can find it.

The pages do come up. It is actually not beneficial for SEO to do this. Google will kick you out of the index if it thinks you are doing this.

Doorway pages are a great one for this. One of the examples we were talking about before was a supermarket job search. A lot of people were searching for supermarket jobs. A website came along and basically created fake pages for every supermarket in the country. It was basically nonsense text, but it would lead you through to all sorts of other stuff. This website was getting a crazy amount of traffic from picking up all of the job searches.

When you actually look at the page and read the content, the content was terrible, but it was just hoovering up all of that search. Google came along and banned it. You can't find it any more if you search for it.

One famous example was BMW themselves. They had their website kicked out of Google for about a month. This was an old case, but it demonstrates how Google will not differentiate between a small burn and a big firm when it comes to this kind of practice.

We do not recommend doing this because Google will find you and the people that will report you are your competitors. If you report someone who is doing dodgy practices, you get shifted up a couple of pages in the ranks. I'm not telling you to do that, but I know a lot of agencies that would.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
From an accessibility point of view, the prevalence of hidden text ranges from annoying to incredibly frustrating. Where people had hidden chunks of text, in relatively good English, and it is just additional content that they think would help, that will hold their SEO and it will not make me want to weep too much. Maybe they have even taken the print copy and the half they have cut out, they have just made it invisible to the average user, but it is still indexable.

The worst scenarios are having hundreds and hundreds of key words. They are a blanket bomb approach to every last thing that we think would be remotely relevant to this page. Google has got wise to that and you are on dangerous territory if your websites employ those sorts of tactics these days.

GERRY WHITE:
Absolutely.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
On the next page, there were a few other areas, perhaps on and off-site, where people might want some pearls of wisdom that you can give us about other things, other areas of SEO.

GERRY WHITE:
Hitting it right in terms of getting the pages correct, it is a lot of little things you can get wrong. It is quite simple. There was something called the canonical tag. If you get that wrong, it can create all sorts of issues. There are lots of little issues, but there are more significant ones nowadays. Websites are a lot better than they used to be.

Something like 25% of websites are now built on WordPress and WordPress is great, because it solves a lot of the issues for you. It is not perfect, but it means you don't have to worry about a lot of the old school issues that we are still desperately trying to fix.

You can go to a website, clicking through to various pages and it is easy to read, you are getting most of it right. But there is always more to it than that. Google doesn't use JavaScript very well, for instance. It often gets it wrong. If you have a menu that is exclusively made out of JavaScript, it is a problem. There are lots of those things where you need to make sure those things are fixed up. But it is really quite simple nowadays.

We do produce documents, usually about 40 pages long, when we come to audit the site. But most of it is around making sure the code is accessible, there isn't too much code, making sure the site is as clean and simple as possible, but the content is absolutely no problem nowadays.

[Max.Uk.Captioner is Live]

MARK WALKER:
You are also saying that we need to get it right off-site. There is less of an accessibility angle there, I think, but if we have a nice tidy site, and the code is well produced and curated, all of that makes the difference as far as accessibility. There are other things to do when it comes to SEO tags.

GERRY WHITE:
Absolutely. It is like having the foundations of a house. If you have a good site, you need to tell people about it. You can't go out and buy more. Google does base a lot of its algorithm on people coming to your site from links. If you have a lot of links from blogs or the BBC or the Guardian coming onto your site... That is always the most challenging thing. How do you get those initial few links?

Part of it is using social media and talking to people on Twitter or whichever platform they are on. Make sure you have a Facebook page, all of that social media and make sure that you are talking to the relevant people. You will soon find that the website is running a lot better.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
I feel another webinar coming on on optimising your site visibility or your brand presence, using social media and the overlap between that and accessibility. That leads us nicely onto the closing topic, which I will pass back to Mark for. He will summarise the overlap between accessibility and SEO.

MARK WALKER:
Thanks, Robin. To draw to a close, we will move onto questions for a moment, I think we will try and summarise some of the key points about common ground between SCO and accessibility. From the point of view of Robin and myself, and talking to Gerry in the last week or so, it is quite clear that there is a lot of common ground in order to get accessibility right in order to aid SEO and to deliver better performances.

It is really about good discipline, as Google likes good quality content. We know that Google is a priority as far as SEO goes. Getting it right in terms of hierarchy and content, as well as titling, is going to be very valuable when it comes to accessibility and search engine optimisation.

The other thing is not seeing images as text, which means they're not searchable. This has a big effect. Making sure they are meaningful gives SEO a booster makes the website much more visible.

The use of keywords and keeping the content simple and easy-to-use, is rewarded in terms of search engine optimisation. Ultimately, it penalises, as Robin said - this is payback time for him - there is so much junk stuffed in there.

I think the underlying bit is about accessibility and your users. That should pay off. People are looking for questions in search engines and want your content to deliver that back to them. That's what a lot of search engines have done recently, making it much clearer between what a user is searching for and what they have found.

The rest is like an inverted pyramid. This will also have a payoff when it comes to accessibility and using a screen reader, as they can get that information much more quickly and be confident that they are in the right place.

I'm going to move onto questions and answers. I've got a couple of questions coming in.

The first one has been asked a couple of times. I will reiterate that this is being recorded and there will be a transcript afterwards as well, which comes from the live captioning, so the content will be available afterwards - so, anyone who is interested, it will be around. We will also do a blog post on this as well.

The first question, a general one. Would mobile-enabled websites produce better results for SEO? That means they are better for screen readers and better for optimisation in general, but there is no tagging when it comes to things which are mobile enabled. In terms of SEO in particular…

GERRY WHITE:
Yes, Google loves these buzzwords. If you shrink the screen, the website will shrink at the same time. There are many ways… Mobile SEO is a massive topic. There are lots of ways you can approach the problem. You can approach this by having two different websites. The problem there is that if they don't link up, sometimes you'll get redirected to a completely different page. That is actually bad for SEO. Google does love mobile websites though, and will rank you better if you have a mobile friendly enabled website. 

It is quite challenging to get it all right. In essence, it is not rocket science and it is important when it comes to user experience. That is all we need to remember.

MARK WALKER:
In your experience of using screen readers, is the dawning of the mobile site… Is it cutting out a lot of the problems or bringing a lot with it?

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
There is 100% overlap with what Gerry has been saying. There is a bloated desktop site and that is the worst-case scenario. It would be better to have a slim, concise website that is not as graphically heavy and therefore probably has a lot more indexable content. That is a dream, not just for SEO, but for accessibility as well. In between, as Gerry was saying, there is a golden ground, an ideal place where you have a responsive site, we don't have to maintain two different versions and get thrown from the desktop to the website versions.

In these cases, the content has been cut back to make it more concise. You have also thought about SEO, and that means you have also thought about accessibility. That's the best of both worlds.

MARK WALKER:
Thank you. I suppose it is. All you hear about usability is that you start with a mobile first when you are designing a site, when you are at the start of the design project.

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
Yes, when you are designing anything from scratch these days. Absolutely.

GERRY WHITE:
From a data point of view, we are seeing that there is an explosion of growth in regards to tablets. In non B2B websites, these are exploding. 50% of all traffic, even more in some cases…

MARK WALKER:
Yes, the single size screen is not all you're designing for.

One more question and then we are done. You mentioned FAQs. Someone asked if it was better to have the FAQs on separate pages, or should you have multiple FAQ pages for each question?

GERRY WHITE:
That is a great question. This is a twofold problem.

When you come out and look, there is a particular tag on a page. The downside of that is in the content. If you have a short question and a short answer, it means you don't have much content on the page. Google doesn't actually like that. If there is no content on the page, it tends to say that there is not enough and, not exclude it, but rank another page above it. This is called the content risk.

MARK WALKER:
Robin, have you found that as well?

ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON:
No, I think the sweet spot is to think about the audience and who your website is catering for. There is the professional, the consumer, and then think about the frequently asked questions and subdivide those answers that speak to that one audience. That is going to speak to the users, and it is going to help with SEO and accessibility.

MARK WALKER:
It is now two o'clock. Bang on time. Thank you very much you two and I've really enjoyed sitting and chatting about SEO and accessibility with you. There is clearly a lot of common ground. A big thank you to you Gerry.

Next month, we're going to look the at travel sector from a marketing perspective. It is very interesting, we hope, for anyone involved in marketing and SEO. It is not just about people who are in the SEO business, it clearly spans across a wide range of people.

So, thank you very much. As I said, the webinar will be available as a video afterwards. We will put the slides up and you can contact us in various ways through the email address, through the AbilityNet website or through my email address. You can also use a search engine as a starting point.

Thank you very much everyone. I will see you on the next session.