Accessibility For SEO
1-day Course in Using Accessibility Techniques for Advanced SEO — SAC
SEO Training Course Overview
This SEO course is designed to improve the findability and shareability of your website on search engines and social networks — by the cunning application of the cutting-edge accessibility techniques found in HTML5, CSS3 and WAI-ARIA standards.
This course levers these accessibility techniques in the following complementary ways:
- By making sites easier and more pleasant to use — for all classes of user
- By making it easier for humans and software to share content on social networks
- By exploiting similarities between the way that content analysis software and assistive technologies understand and navigate web content
Please note: The techniques taught in this course are the very opposite of the outdated keyword-stuffing approaches to SEO — which actively discriminated against blind web users, and are now counter-productive for your position on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Course contents — 1 Accessibility equals SEO
- User interaction mediated by software
- Machine reading
- Reliance on metadata
- Text-based
- Dependent on generic web standards
- Not just search engines and AT
- Mobile, social media, web 2.0 …
- Rely on the same tech standards
- Find-ability, search-ability, navigability
Course contents — 2 Tools
- For ‘seeing’ like a blind bot
- Screen readers
- Text-only browsers
- Code inspectors, incl. Firebug
- Simulating the blind bot's view …
- Of your content and metadata
Course contents — 3 Software content analysis
- Selection
- Visibility
- Viewing metadata
- Senseo
- Metadata in SERPs
- Metadata and social network previews
- Controlling your message
- Comparing inaccessible vs. accessible views
Course contents — 4 Accessible & SEO-friendly
- HTML5's semantic markup
- Hiding and revealing
- Redundancy
- Titles, headings, lists, emphasis, etc.
- Links, images, multimedia
- Menus and navigation
- Focus, skips, drop-downs, alternativs
- Rich snippets — structured data
- Microformats, microdata and RDFa
- Dates and times, places, events, people, organisations, relationships
Course Objectives
On completion of this advanced SEO training course, students will be able to:
- Understand why accesssibility works for SEO
- Appreciate how search tech works like assistive technology (AT)
- Use AT to visualise data from the search engine's perspective
- Use accessibility techniques to enhance content findability
- Use accessibility techniques to enhance content semantics
- Use accessibility techniques to improve content targeting
- Use accessibility techniques to control site messages
- Use accessibility techniques to build links
Target Audience
- Web designers
- Web developers
- Web marketing and communications managers
Training Pre-requisites
The following — or equivalent knowledge and experience:
- A basic understanding of SEO
- Covered by this basic SEO course
- A basic understanding of HTML — provided by:
- Our basic web design course
- Or our basic HTML course
- A basic understanding of CSS-based web-design
- Covered by this basic CSS course
Training Style
Instructor-led, hands-on training.