I feel pretty honored to write the first blog post for the 2010 Soul of Athens (SOA) project. The Vico 488/588 students will be keeping you up-to-date on some of the technical issues we’re focusing on as we build the Soul of Athens website, so let me start off with a look at search engine optimization or SEO.

When I mentioned I was doing a presentation about SEO to a former SOA web designer, he looked at me like I had six heads! Yes, we are on a short deadline, but as with all our marketing efforts, what good is all this hard work if no one sees it? And there may be another issue at play.

Definitions for SEO are very easy to Google, but let me sum it up in terms I like; Getting your website to show up as high as humanly possible on search engines without paying a dime for it.

SEO is in some ways really simple. No one seems to know exactly what makes it work, so you’re hardly ever wrong – kind of like being a weather forecaster. The rules change a lot, most of the signals search engines like Google use are big, fat, hairy secrets and of course, marketing/news/trends etc. play a big role in whether or not people will ever find your precious key words. So we should just throw up our hands and give up.

Nah.

Interestingly enough, by just doing one tiny thing, it turns out we can really improve our odds of winning the SEO game.

According to the United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 650 million people worldwide are considered handicapped. By making simple adjustments to the way we develop our website so they too can enjoy our content, we will automatically improve our standing with search engines. Even if it didn’t improve SEO, personally I think we all owe Tim Berners-Lee a nod as we carry out his vision to make the Internet accessible to everyone.

People with handicaps often use special technology to help them interpret the web so they can get to the information they are looking for. For instance, a blind person may use technology that speaks a website for them, a deaf person can read the captions on a video. When you type a word or phrase into a search engine, it sends out bots that sift through websites to find the words you are looking for. These bots are blind and deaf and they need special things to help them find what they are looking for. In both worlds, SEO and Accessibility, we can do a lot to help our audience find and use our content.

Here are a few things we can do to serve both needs:

• Use descriptive alt tags on images
• Hard code descriptive words as text
• Use key words for h1, h2, h3, etc headers – not necessarily AP style headlines
• Use the meta description tag carefully and thoughtfully
• Make sure your html and css validates – no broken links
• Use anchor text for links that are descriptive
• Use captions on videos

There are a lot more things we can do to improve both SEO and Accessibility. It would be great to get a list going here. What should we all be focusing on in this area and why?

- Jill Bateman, Marketing Team