Google - Your Accessible Web Design Girlfriend

 Owning a Mobile app development & Website and trying to get it to rank with Google is an awful lot like being a teenage boy trying to lose his cherry.

Google have got something you want and to get it you're either going to have to be very charming or you’re going to have to stump up a lot of cash.

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One way is going to get guaranteed results but fill you with a sense of shame; the other is altogether more rewarding and free (sort of). In the world of search, this is the distinction between paid search marketing and natural search optimization: paying Google directly or working on having content Google deem worthy of recognition.

Assuming he wants to go the natural route, our teenage boy needs two things to get the girl: an attractive package and lots of other people telling her he’s got an attractive package.

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But there’s a secret which is often overlooked (you may want to put on Lionel Richie’s "Hello" at this point) -the girl of your dreams is blind.

Which means that fancy clothes and £l00 haircuts just won't wash with her. So how do you convince her? Firstly, get lots of other people to send her in your direction (inbound links) and secondly, you need to let her know that what's on the inside is more important than the packaging (content over style).

How does this translate into action for your website?

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1. Make sure all your text is readable

Blind people access the internet by using screen readers. These are pieces of software that scan the text on the page and create synthesized speech, which is read to the user.

Google access your site using "spiders" who crawl over your pages looking for content.

The temptation of many designers - especially those with a print background - is to corral important textual elements such as headings, menus and slogans, into looking exactly how they want. This is usually achieved by using Adobe Flash or by putting the text inside an image.

Googlina, like all blind users, struggles with Adobe Flash and can't see what's in your images at all.

The lesson? Deliver textual content as text not images.

2. Organise your pages

HTML (the "language" used to describe a web page to your browser) was intended as a means to exchange documents over the internet. Over the years we've extended the capabilities of the web beyond recognition, but a web page is still at heart a document and as such requires structure: clear, meaningful headings, a logical order and semantic organisation.

This helps both blind and sighted users discern the structure of your content and gives Google plenty of hints as to what your content is all about.

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Make your link text meaningful

Those screen readers mentioned earlier often have a function to run through the content of a page and pick out links within it. These are then read out before anything else to allow the user to choose to follow them. Imagine how frustrating it would be to be read something like this "home, about us, our services, testimonials, contact us, click here, click here, click here, click here, follow this link, find out more, click here, click here".

Links need to be meaningful even when stripped of their visual context. And guess who else likes to be told what’s behind a link? Googlina! And in fact, having meaningful keywords in both your internal and external links is one of the most important factors in getting your site up the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).