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:

  1. By making sites easier and more pleasant to use — for all classes of user
  2. By making it easier for humans and software to share content on social networks
  3. 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Please note: The techniques taught in this course are the very opposite of the outdated keyword-stuffing approaches to SEO — which actively discriminated against blind web users, and are now counter-productive for your position on search engine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:

Training Style

Instructor-led, hands-on training.

The Web Design Academy Contact us

By form

By Phone

+44 (0)113 234 4611

By email

enquiries@thewebdesign.academy

By snail mail

Suite 3 15 South Parade Leeds LS1 5PQ United Kingdom