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My current project — smartlivecasino.com — is meant to be visually attractive. It’s an entertainment experience, after all.

Unfortunately, the people who originally designed the site saw it more as a work of art than a sales tool. As a result, there are loads of pretty pictures, most of which don’t even have alt-tags, and little actual text.

To the human eye it looks fine, but to any ONE — or any THING — not relying on vision there’s a problem. Strip away the imagery and there’s very little for a search engine spider to index except for a few links and disconnected phrases: not exactly what you’d call good content. No doubt we’ve all seen worse: sites where even the text is displayed as a GIF image, and an un-tagged one at that.

For good SEO any site needs words, and sentences made up from these words, and paragraphs made from these sentences. The bottom line is that only by increasing the number of words on a page can one hope to improve keyword densities to that sweet spot of between 5% and 15% of the total.

Indeed, the current version of smartlivecasino.com comes close to running the risk of agitating the search engines because the density of certain keywords is greater than 20%: to a search engine that could look like “blackhat” SEO.

But before undertaking a major redesign, can anything else can be done to improve matters?

Well, remember the bit about any ONE? If you consider the page from a disability access standpoint, there are plenty of things that could be done to make it more useful to someone with a visual impairment, or a search engine.

A good first step would be to alt-tag all the images using clear keyword-rich phrases. A stage further would be to add keyword-rich TITLE tags to images, links and any other media. Neither of these measures would disturb the look of the page in any way but they would give more content for the search engines to spider.

However, the line NEVER to cross is to include hidden text in your page, artificially increasing the keyword density by peppering it with white text on a white background or commented out phrases which bear no relation to the code. That sort of thing WILL get you in Google’s bad books.

I say “never” but it depends on what you mean by hidden; however, that’s another post …

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I’m still amazed at the number of people who ask for a “splash page” on their site: preferably something with lots of animated gifs “because they look nice”.

It’s become almost a mantra with me that home pages must provide a reason for the visitor to come back. (Actually, all pages should give the visitor a reason to come back because it’s just as likely that they’ll parachute in as a result of a link from StumbleUpon or Facebook or some search engine.) So your homepage should feature fresh content, perhaps even some random call to action, to keep it interesting.

This was all confirmed by a reread of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. And then it dawned on me as I looked over the homepage of this very site, it too was a splash page. One visit was enough to know everything it said and there was precious little novelty: no reason to come back.

Needless to say, I’ve begun a rewrite of the JWC home page. There’s still some way to go — I will be adding some live updated content in the form of RSS too — but there’s certainly lessons to be learned.

They include:

• Never be afraid to re-examine your content
• Never be complacent about your site, and
• Take your own good advice

Good Lessons

Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, but almost all of it is still relevant. I’ll be regurgitating much of it in the coming weeks, with some more up to date insights of my own.

But usability is a vital part of good SEO and you neglect it at your peril. It’s not just a question of hard-to-use web sites not being “sticky” (actually, studies show that people will persevere with an inaccessible website because they fear the alternative won’t be much better), a usable site makes for better SEO because it is attractive to humans and robots.

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I spotted this sign recently in a major NHS children’s hospital and I had to smile (perhaps that’s the point, though I reckon the humor is too nerdy for most kids — or their parents). It’s an example of colour contrast, first outlined by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and shows that some colour combinations just don’t work, in this case yellow and white.

So the joke is that the one statement that’s most difficult to read is all about communication.

Some colours just don’t work with each other, if your main aim is clear communication. Yellow on White (although white on a deep yellow may work); Green on Red; Red on Green; Blue on Blue; the list goes on an on …

Fortunately, there are several web-based tools to help you choose color schemes. My favorites are ColorJack which is  very good for accessibility testing; DeGraeve’s Palette Generator; Colormixers; and the 4096 Color mixer.

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In a recent post on Roger Johansson’s excellent 456 Berea Street site, the subject of Content Management Systems (CMS) and accessibility is discussed.

I have recently been involved in the selection of a CMS and accessibility was at the forefront of the decision-making process. Regular visitors to this site will notice just how much I bang on about the subject, but it is important.

Roger’s post is more about the accessibility of CMS user interfaces (UI) than the accessibility of code produced by CMSes; however, it was painfully obvious that most modern commercial CMSes aren’t geared up for accessible code output.

One of the main contenders I examined was Microsoft’s “state-of-the-art” MOSS 2007 which, suprisingly for a “bleeding edge” web 2.0 CMS, seemed to have very little accessibility built in. In the normal course of events, Microsoft often wait until Service Pack 2 before providing a complete product, so the current offering is a little underfeatured, but it was quite shocking to be told by a Microsoft developer that they had written “modifications” to MOSS2007 which produced the “first accessible website in the UK using MOSS2007″.

Very few [CMS developers] seem to actually understand what accessibility (or web standards, for that matter) is

— Roger Johansson, 456bereastreet.com

Perhaps it’s not so difficult to understand Microsoft’s arrogance about accessibility. After all, this is the company who said in 1994 they had no plans to produce a web browser and then swiftly changed their mind when they saw how Netscape was cornering the market. They’re big. They don’t follow trends, they set them!

In fact, only one of the candidates we examined had anything near an appreciation of accessibility issues, including an accessibility checker function to scan for the most obvious issues: Ektron’s CMS400.

Personally, I believe there are two major reasons for the lack of attention to accessibility in current CMS platforms: accessibility is labour-intensive to get right; CMS developers don’t understand just how important it is.

Accessibility is labour-intensive: It’s quite a difficult process tagging content (and layout) to make it accessible, not least because much of the accessibility standard is contradictory.

CMS developers don’t understand: Everyone thinks of the internet as being young and fresh and innovative, especially because much of the industry is composed of young and fresh (and cheap) designers and programmers and account executives. In reality, the fastest growing markets are among the so-called “Silver Surfers” with time on their hands and money to spend. Coupled with this is the fact that as a result of falling birthrates, the demographic is changing to favour the oldies with their poor eyesight, low technical grasp and nostalgic hankerings.

I’m sure it will all change, not least because accessibility goes hand in hand with the “semantic web“; the ability to use one set of code on an infinite number of browser platforms. It’s a happy coincidence that the theory that says code should work equally well on your laptop as your iPhone means that it also works on your JAWS screen reader for the visually impared.

And I’m not being PC, it’s not just blind people who use screen readers!

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