Making Your Portfolio Site More Accessible

Email us | Phone: +1 615-771-5611

Forgot your password? | Not a member? Sign up for free

Home > Blogs! > John Sternig's Blog

Making Your Portfolio Site More Accessible posted on 13th of august, 2010

SEO 101: Accessibility

Accessibility and search engine optimization go hand-in-hand. If you make your site highly accessible, you can be fairly certain that your content is optimized for search engines. In fact, it often helps to think of search engines as people visiting your site with a screen reader.

While there are guidelines for website accessibility, the most important elements of accessibility and SEO are as follows:

* Provide alternative text for images
* Provide text descriptions for video and Flash content (or better yet, don’t use Flash at all!)
* Provide relevant page titles
* Don’t make any of your content rely on JavaScript

Provide Alternative Text for Images

Search engines, just like blind users, can only consume content on your site that is readable in some way. This means that an image doesn’t provide any meaning to them so it is essential that you provide some alternative text that describes what is happening in the image. This is actually quite simple; it only requires one additional attribute to an image element.

alt="A herd of elephants in Africa" />

These alt attributes can be filled with keywords and relevant content that can have a huge impact on your SEO, depending on how often you use images on your site.
Video, Flash, and Accessibility

Just as with images, search engines are unable to determine the contents of a video file because there is no text for them to index. In order to receive any SEO benefits from your video content, you need to provide a text alternative to allow search engines and people using screen readers to understand what that piece of content is about. As you can see, if you keep handicapped users in mind when creating your content, you will improve your SEO as well.

Read the rest of the article and learn more tricks to making your site more accessible at Perception's Blog.

Tags: accessibility optimization portfolio seo website

Comments (8)

	Great info, Thanks! - posted by Irisangel on August 14, 2010
	Great article! Thanks for sharing! :) - posted by Mariaam on August 14, 2010
	Great post! Thanks for sharing! - posted by Thanatonautii on August 14, 2010
	You are right! - posted by Cristalloid on August 14, 2010
	Great article! - posted by Justmeyo on August 13, 2010
	Thanks for sharing this info... - posted by Egomezta on August 13, 2010
	Great blog, John! - posted by smartview27 on August 13, 2010
	Thanks John for sharing this great point! Actually that what I do when I have text in an image as well! Have a great day! - posted by Mani33 on August 13, 2010

Comments (8)

This article has been read 716 times. 8 readers have found this article useful.
Photo credits: Roman Milert.

Search the blogs!

Latest articles (RSS 2.0

)

Your Thoughts on PIPA and SOPA?

Use SITEMAPS draw more visitors to your portfolio

Increase Your Sales with Inbound Links

Making Your Portfolio Site More Accessible

Make Your Print Materials More Effective

Have a Website? Secrets to Effective Linking

Is Your Business Card as Effective as it Could Be?

Page Structure and Tags: What Does it Mean for Your Website?

SEO 101: Page Titles and Meta Elements

Get Your Photography Business Noticed

Create your own blog in seconds...

My favourite articles

None
More favorite articles

About Me

John Sternig (Jsternig)
West Bend, US

<10



	Upload image \| About Us \| FAQ \| Contact Us \| Terms of use \| API / Referral program \| Site map \| Privacy policy \| Free Stock Images Support - phone: +1 615-771-5611, Click here to contact us

	Copyright © 2000-2012 Dreamstime. All rights reserved. Dreamstime is a member of PACA and CEPIC.