Visibility, Navigability, Accessibility.

Essential Website Basics: Visibility, Navigability & Accessibility

It stands to reason that there is little point in having a website as a main business tool if it can’t be found or accessed by search engines, and human visitors. Too much of a focus on design, image and appearance can mean missing some basic essentials which could have a serious impact on your online business if they’re not addressed:

Search engines need to know that your web pages exist.
Search engines need to be able to find their way through your web pages in order to find out more about the pages in your website beyond the home page.
Human visitors have different challenges and use different means when accessing the Web and your web pages, and your content should be accessible to all.

Letting Search Engines Know You’re Out There

Search engine ‘bots’ are actively gathering information about the web pages they can find so that these can be made available in search engine results, but what if the search engines simply don’t know your web pages exist? This is likely to be the case for new web sites, and for some websites which aren’t currently in a position to be found or haven’t taken steps to do so.

How Do Search Engines Know That Your Web Pages Exist?

In today’s online environment there are 3 basic ways that search engines can discover your web pages:

Via an outgoing link on another web page which the search engines visit at another domain i.e. an incoming link to your web page.
By pro-actively telling the search engines that you have a new website. For example, you can go to Google’s google.com/addurl section and submit your new website URL so that it’s basically ‘on the list’ to be visited and crawled.
By pro-actively submitting an XML site map for a new website.

Pro-actively telling search engines about new websites via search engine URL submission pages and using XML site maps are therefore the most preferable options.

Making Sure That Search Engines and Human Visitors Can Access and Navigate Your Web Pages

Just as human Web users have different personal challenges, search engines are more or less challenged by different types of files, scripts and content. One type of content that search engines aren’t challenged by is the basic type of content that gives search engines the most information about web pages and that is good old TEXT. When it comes to finding out what your web pages are about, Google for example is less challenged by text-based files e.g. html (with text in the pages), PDFs, Docs, Txt files etc.

Search Engines are more challenged by files and scripts which either don’t contain text as such, are ‘moving targets’ or are simply difficult to access or find a way through. These types of files and scripts include images, movies, music, dynamic pages / dynamic pages which frequently change and JavaScript. With many of these file types Google will try to use text that can be attached in some way to them or text that is close proximity, or event the words that make up the file name in order to get more of a clue as to their meaning.

Other Human Challenges & Technological Challenges

Some Human Web Users are visually challenged and may be using special readers / browsers which rely on text / text based elements to access and make sense of the pages. Many modern Web users will be using all manner of mobile devices to access pages, each with their different capacity to access and download various web page elements.

Steps That You Can Take To Get Your Pages Accessible and Navigable

Here are some steps you can take to be as sure as possible that as many search engines and human visitors as possible can find their way through your web pages and have the opportunity to make sense of their contents:

View your web pages in a text only browser e.g. Lynx, or obtain a Spider Simulator Report or its equivalent. This will show what text and links can be seen and read.
Use descriptive file names and Alt Tags / Alt Text / IMG Alt Attributes for images, and make sure there is some useful descriptive text in close proximity to important photos and graphics.
Don’t build important text content only in a Flash movie or image. Make sure important messages and key phrases actually appear as typed in text in your pages.
Use TEXT for the CORE INFORMATION and NAVIGATION of the website. Regard other ‘rich media’ as extras.
Don’t rely on a JavaScript / Flash / image-based menu as the sole means of navigation on your website. Make sure that (particularly on your home page) there are links within the text of your pages to the other important pages in your website.
Focus on your website users and their needs.

Take into account the use of other types of browsers e.g. mobile or screen readers when constructing your pages and their navigation system.