Dani Iswara .Net

Belajar SEO, Web Standards and Usability-based Techniques

Belajar SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a term which I found on the web. They talk about SEO practices to increase SERPs ranking, traffic and money. I guess it is not that easy or difficult. Actually, I don’t understand the meaning of ‘true’ SEO from the SEM point of view. In my opinion, it shouldn’t just a tricky way, simple keyword research and analysis, emphirical study — personal point of view, Google guessing, buying links..but who knows..

Why don’t they start from the web standards, accessibility, usability techniques that delivered useful content / services for human (and machine too)? Who is your blog’s visitors / viewers or who is your targeted end users?

1. Humans
   There are people with vision impairment, color blind, totally blind, elderly people, people with disabilities, mobile (device) users, bandwidth-aware users and users on slow Internet connection.
2. Machines
   People may come through web / online search engines e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN / Live.com. Some of them use screen readers or voice browsers, touch-screen browsers, modern and (W3C) standards compliant browsers such as Opera, Firefox (Gecko-based: Mozilla, Flock, Swiftfox, Iceweasel, etc), Safari (Webkit-based: Konqueror). Most of users still use an old and non-standards compliant browsers such as Internet Explorer (IE 5, IE 6). Don’t forget people on Linux machines with no proprietary fonts (MS fonts; msttcore-fonts is available to resolve this problem). The rest are feed readers, small screen devices, printers, projectors and label-filtered softwares.

I’ll updated if I missed something..

Based on those principals, here are some important things. The web pages should:

• viewable
• navigable
• accessible
• useable
• useful

Some concept has already posted on Dani Iswara .Net blog titled Belajar SEO dan Aksesibilitas Web in Bahasa Indonesia.

Understanding User Needs to Learn SEO

In more detail we can say:
First impression, overall design look with the proper graphic design and fast loading (remember of file sizes, http request, compression) will make user to stay and decided to browse deeper. Displayed properly on all browsers with any screen resolution (wide and small screen) is suggested. Use plugin if needed.
Consistent and accessible navigation links are a must. Provides text links, not just image or javascript-based. User’s eye will be more comfortable with the artistic color schemes and safe color contrast. Visually impairment users will read and suggest text (within the text content) with the underline as a link. People with disabilities (who can’t use mouse) will use tab keys (keyboard access keys) to move within the links or sections. Changing color on focusing and hovering (:focus, :hover; CSS code) will be useful. Links should have a relevant content and describes clearly, not just “click here”. Web safe fonts (e.g. sans-serif, serif, monospace), left aligned and resizeable text are more usable as the best practice on the web.

Readers (human) usually don’t have a time to read a ‘book’ or long content on the online web pages, especially for user with time-based Internet connection. Some user will choose to save the page. Remember that several characters on title or post title are difficult to save. Try to save the post title that contains the separator: », @, | and -. The last two (with space in words) is most useful in SEO but ” - ” (single dash) is more usable, I guess..
Users will use a kind of fast reading techniques like scanning and skimming. See Standar Web, Membaca Cepat, SEO in Bahasa Indonesia. Here we need semantic X/HTML correctly markup. See Semantik XHTML, Aksesibilitas, SEO (Indonesia). Some special text such as title, h1, h2-h6, strong text, emphasized, anchor links, first and last sentences or paragraphs will be helpful to catch the main idea of the web pages. Efficient keywords as special text will be useful for search engine crawlers. Webagogo use those rules on their SEO score and ICRA label for the web safe content. More detail on Catatan Analisis Blog versi Webagogo (Indonesia). Search engine crawlers are as blind as screen readers. Always provides alternative text (e.g. alt, descriptive text) for images, animation, user / client-side script (javascript; use noscript code if possible) and multimedia content such as flash, sound, MP3, video, map, etc.

In the long term, Belajar SEO using web standards, semantic X/HTML, web accessibility / usability has the advantage (positive ’side effect’ or bonus): backward compatibility with the web browser / screen reader technology, better Google’s PageRank and SERPs.

Help readers (and machines) to understand the quality content. Then you can receive money natural backlinks fairly..