what do you mean by this? I dont understand.
O.K I appologize if I sound patronising here, just incase I misunderstood you.
Blind people use web browsers known as screen readers, these do exactly what they do on the tin, they literal read aloud the text on the screen.
For example if you have a link saying home a blind user would hear
link1 home
So they know where they are in the page and can then return to that link for later use.
Now just as we deal with browser inconsistencies blind users also do the same, the difference is their browsers aren't cheap they tend to be around $1500, and they have to pay for each upgrade.
Now each screen reader will handle the code differently if it is not coded especially for them.
For example if you leave out the alt attribute most screen readers will read the whole file path of the image instead.
So for example you have an image like this with no alt.
<img src="http://www.yoursite.co.uk/path/to/some/file/.png" />
the screen reader reads out to the user -
http colon backslash backslash www dot yoursite dot co dot uk backslash path backslash to backslash some backslash file dot png
Now if you add the alt attribute that is read out instead.
If the image is for decoration the alt should be left empty, the screen readers will then ignore the image.
Now the title attribute, even though it displays a nice pop up, on all browsers, except Firefox 3 that handles it correctly i think, handles them wrong, is for the screen readers to display more information to a blind user that a sighted user can get from the image or what ever.
Now the problem is that there is a new bad boy, well if you are blind it is pretty much a bad boy lol, entering the market, Thunder, except it is free. However it currently does not read the title attribute out to the user nor have a lot of the other features that the others have.
Check what your site sounds like to some one with a disability by downloading Thunder ~
Download ScreenReader's Thunder, the talking software, free for personal use
You think you have a hard time designing a site, try to get it to sound right as well?!?!?!?
The others Hal, Jaws, Windows-Eyes and the IBM Home Page Reader, do however.
So if you have a link like this ~
<a href="#" title="home">Home</a>
So a blind user using Hal, Jaws, Windows-Eyes or the IBM Home Page Reader, at $1500 a pop, will hear
link 12 home home
So the title should be obmitted.
Now when you design for everyday sighted browsers you account for discrepancies in rendering, in this case you account for the discrepancy that Thunder does not read title attributes, so you place the contents of the title attribute in the alt attribute to get around it for everyone.
Im also intruigued to find out more about the
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
Now the search engines have several tags you can use for them all these go in the head tag of each page that is applicable ~
1.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
2.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
3.
<meta name="robots" content="noimageindex" />
4.
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword" />
5.
<meta name="description" content="description of the page" />
1. This tells the search engines not to index the page, but follow the links off it.
This is good for removing useless pages like the 1's I mentioned.
2. This tells the search engines not to index the page nor follow any links from them.
Again the same as 1.
3. This is a new one that tells the search engines not to include any of your images on that page in their image search index.
This also helps to reduce equity drain, as images aquire equity, or PageRank, as well. I will get to this in a min.
4. Right this tells the search engines what keywords you would like to rank for.
However by overfilling it with useless terms you will get you penalized. Windows Live Search and Google don't use it but Yahoo! is 50/50 TBH. It was at the beginning of the year but they have had 3 major updates to their main algorithum since, 2 quite recently, so not sure. Best to ignore it TBH.
5. This can, and is not always, the search engines algorthiun decides not you, used as a pages description in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Now this is used when content is thin, So I would suggest on pages where content is thin to add this, keep it below 120 characters and keep keyword repetition to a minimum otherwise you will be penalized for trying to cheat the system. Also make it very descriptive to the page. For example if it is a product inculde things like price, size and weight. But a product pages, as yours do should have at least 200 words of actual content so it should not be needed TBH.
I don't use 2, 4 or 5 TBH.
Right now I'll give you a brief SEO lesson.
Pages aquire what is known as equity. You get equity when someone links to you. If they have equity on the page they link to you from you get equity.
If the page has 100 links, internal and external, and the page has equity of say 1000 then you would get 10 equity to the corresponding page. That 10 equity is then shared to all the pages off it on your site.
Now the more equity you have the more it helps you to rank in the SERPs.
There are 100's of ranking factors, and equity is 1 of the main ones, but no-one, not even an average engineer at one of the search engines knows them all. These are kept secret, think a receipe as soon as every one knows them it can be abused, you then lose your secret BBQ source and thus any revene from it. Same for the search engines except thier revene is in the 10's of billions.
So you now have these votes comming into you site from external links you want to maximize which of your pages give votes to which internal pages. You don't want to waste votes on pointless pages like contact us, FAQ, about us etc...as they are not going to bring you traffic.
By doing this you remove those pointless pages by adding the first meta, no point adding the second, this therefore spreads your votes further and helps the other pages to rank better.
Think a war here, you are in the final hour do you give your best weapons accross the board or to the select few that will use them wisely, I.E: product pages, advice pages over support pages.
Now another thing that can halve your equity is when the search engines index your site under www. and non www. , as that to them is too different domain names and thus 2 different sites, this is where you need to sort the conicalization issue out. I.E: redirect the non www. to the www. with a 301 redirect, not a 302 nor a 307 as they are temporary redirects and the search engines handle them differently.
Reading....Yeah I can tell you loads.
The problem is, as with Yahoo!, they have updated 3 times this year so....
Links currently remain the top dog though, this will change over the next 2 years but we shall see, due to search customization at all the big 3.
Now the search engines are going back to more onpage factors, over the last year or so, so to help you with ranking you want to add you keywords in those tags, as it helps you to rank better.
Those tags are -
Strong, b, i, em, li, H1-H6.
Now the effect a H6 will have will not be the same a s a H1. So as you always want to do your best to optimize go for the H1 heading rather than the H2 heading in my advice above.
Even though I am good, no scratch that amzaing
, at SEO ILLS is not my bag, try searching for it. Sorry buddy.
Now you may think WOW brilliant I can just add loads of tags with my keywords in and get great results, wrong you will get penalized. The best advice TBH is to use tags where they fit, if they don't ignore it and move on.
The search engines check these things, never block your css directory that will get you penalized again the search engines check your CSS files for things like hidden text and by blocking it they can not check so assume you are cheating, so be good and don't.
My honest advice is honest don't try to game them, if you are a hot shot on the programming it is very, very possible but you always need to be 1 step a head to continue like that. Just add tags where they make sense, but dont over do it, dont stuff keyword laden text into pages as that will get you penalized, just add some where they make sense, like I suggested. Less, but actuall in the right places, is actually better than going over the top and losing all your rankings.
Right well actually after my first advice for SEO advice I charge £250 for a site review, and £700 to implement it, so I'll be up a while while I add this up, but where would you like me to send the bill
Hope that has helped you and I hope I haven't been too patronising if you know it.
Jaz
Edit: I tried to get all the spelling errors, and colour coded it to break it up, but may have missed some, this post took me about 40mins to write so I couldn't be bothered to spell check. Sorry, I also explaned things slightly better.
Key ~
Purple ~ Hyper Text Markup Language
Green ~ Display output
