Robert Nyman has questions he’d love to have answered about SEO. I’m not the person to answer these questions, certainly, but I can certainly provide commentary.

In particular, it’s nice to see people from the web standards community discussing search optimization. There’s no question that creating a website which applies web standards and the principles of accessibility also creates a nice landing spot for search engines. When you build accessibly, you remove barriers to access for search engines as well as users. Although accessibility and web standards are certainly not necessary for search engine success, they can be an excellent way to kickstart your campaign. New websites in particular are likely to benefit from the crawlability and easy navigation aided by conscientious construction.

Read more: Standards, Accessibility, and Search Engine Optimization

So, the general shape of blog posting around this time of the year is in the form of “my five predictions for 2007″ and in discussing site statistics for the calendar year. I’m not going to bother with predictions; but I’m going to walk through my statistic through the year and talk about what I was doing in the way of marketing and how those activities impacted my site traffic.

It’s been an eventful year, as these statistics fairly clearly demonstrate:

Although any set of site statistics should be taken with a big fat grain of salt, these do seem to show a teensy trend towards more traffic. In the month of January: 156 unique visitors. In December: 4940 unique visitors. What caused this increase?

To be entirely honest, it was a bit of careful planning and intentional personal marketing. Let’s be honest: I’m in business doing accessibility consulting and web design, and I though that increasing traffic to this site might help me in pursuit of that goal.

Month by Month

January

In January, I received, as I mentioned, 156 unique visitors. This is generally along the vein of the traffic I’d receive during the previous year as well, based on, essentially, no marketing at all. I’ve been listed in DMOZ for quite a long time, but as of January that was the extent of my marketing activities.

February

In February, traffic doubled to 300 uniques. This was the result of my authoring a brief tutorial on Blogger. Using the interface, etc. Although most of this information can be found on Blogger’s help pages, this tutorial summarized things nicely. It also mentioned explicity information on uploading documents to Blogger: apparently, a very common question.

This was my first taste of search-based traffic, really: people finding what they want on your site.

March and April

March and April get grouped together because I didn’t really do much more with this site during that time. Instead, I started a second site: inter:digital strategies, a search marketing consultancy. I joined Cre8asite Forums and began to maintain a search marketing blog. Both of these things increased my overall industry profile, but didn’t directly associate with http://www.joedolson.com.

May

In May I authored a pair of articles on Boolean searching with PHP and MySQL, which accompanied a PHP script doing that very task. These were highly strategic: I knew full well that this was a highly specific search query which was currently lacking any valuable search results. I filled it. The articles were posted in mid May: my traffic doubled that month.

June, July and August

During the summer months, I continued to let things grow. I began a blog at JoeDolson.com and backfilled it with a few of my older announcements and articles. I continued posting heavily at Cre8asite Forums and in both blogs. I took a month’s vacation (all of July). I moved from Vienna, Austria to Saint Paul, MN. Traffic kept growing, a mixture of the greater search traffic spawned from my PHP/MySQL articles and the higher profile which was gaining valuable in bound links.

In August, I became a site grader for Accessites, an awesome accessible design showcase, thanks to the invitation of Mike Cherim.

September through December

Kept on writing. Ultimately, this is the key: find an article that needs to be written and write it. Overall, this technique caused my traffic to multiply 35-fold over the course of this year. I spent practically nothing on any other kind of marketing: a couple of quality directory submissions which were probably completely unnecessary, but otherwise my only expense was my own time.

And what has this meant?

At the beginning of the year, my job queries were very slow: I knew a few people who might need websites, and would talk to them and let them know I was available. Every once in a while, I’d receive a cold contact: 90% of this proved to be unqualified leads. This week, I’ve been contacted 7 times so far through my website. Two job proposals, four “thank you” notes for articles, and one offer to become a moderator at Cre8asite Forums. (Thanks, Kim!).

No question in my mind: business profile is the key to success on the web. In my industry, this has meant writing useful articles, helping people out through Cre8asite Forums, and letting people know I’m out here. The key has been writing with people in mind: being friendly, approachable, and responsive. Do I think that my writing alone has made this much of an impact? No, frankly. I think the fact that I’ve also made a concerted effort to respond to blog comments, to respond to every query I receive through my contact form, and that I’ve helped people is what’s ultimately been the most effective marketing tool I could wield.

When you’re at a major industry conference, there’s always the possibility you’ll find out some piece of information you didn’t already know. (Actually, that’s the whole point of a conference, as I understand it.) One thing I picked up on Monday is the news that Webmaster Radio, one of the top locations for web industry news and interviews, is in the process of launching their second generation website – which will include complete text transcriptions of their two years of audio archives.

Now, their motivation isn’t really accessibility. However, with audio files, as in live streaming audio sites or podcasting, text becomes a real problem from a search perspective. Do search spiders know what you’ve talked about? No – they’re as deaf as a POST. Adding an audio transcription provides access for the deaf as well as feeding the search crawler what they really want: text.

You can put gobs of text in ID3 tags which are prepended to your audio file. These tags are crawlable, since they are actually text documents attached to the audio file. They have their own problems, however – they can’t generally be separated from the audio file for a visual reading unless the user has software with ID3 tag editing capabilities, such as iTunes. Many people do have iTunes – but is it at all reasonable to expect somebody to download your file, import it to their audio editor or iTunes, and go to edit the tags on the off hand chance that this file has a transcription? Probably not.

Separate text transcriptions provide the easiest, most natural way for an audio file to be accessed by the deaf – this is a great move on the part of Webmaster Radio. Being deaf prevents you from doing very little on the web – but listening to talk radio is not an available option.

Yesterday, I installed a great little plugin which tracks my top 10 viewed posts. Unsurprisingly, this gives me a greater sense of what posts people are visiting as well as providing a means for other people to see my more popular writings.

But it came with some surprises…

Currently, and by a HUGE margin, my most popular post is a post announcing Jim Byrne’s latest book. It’s a nothing post: a paragraph saying who Jim Byrne is (founder of GAWDS, a brief sentence saying something nice about the book, and a link to the book’s sale page on LuLu.com.

And yet, it was visited 100 times in the last 24 hours. I’d known that this page received an unusually high amount of traffic; but this is well beyond what I expected.

And, of course, now that it’s in my top 10 (really, top 5 – I edited the plugin), it’s creating a bit of a feedback loop: curious people will continue to visit it to try and see what’s so special.

My assumption is that most of these visitors are looking for review information: advice about the book, etc. So I’ve added to the post. Hopefully, I’ll be giving these visitors what they’re looking for: I didn’t expand the article into a huge review — it’s not a huge book, after all! But it’s a more meaningful article now than it was before.

It’s a good thing, knowing what pages people most frequently visit on your site. Those are good pages to pay close attention to: if they aren’t already, change them to try and deliver what your visitors are looking for.

Well, I’m back from my travels (more on that later), and I’d say that what seems the most interesting to me in the mountains of documents metaphorically sitting in my inbox is the introduction of Google’s Accessible Web Search.

The idea is absolutely valuable, in my mind. Like other indexes of accessible web sites, it gives the impaired user the ability to search knowing that what they find will also be something that they can actually use. However, having a brilliant idea doesn’t necessarily make the product all that great.

I’m certainly not the first to comment on this, but the several others who have had comments to make have generally agreed that the realization is flawed. First of all, there’s Google’s standard non-standards-based web design. Sure, it’s a very simple page, and there’s not much there to confuse the visitor. I can accept that. This isn’t necessarily a page where they precision of the code makes that much difference. However, it’s also worthwhile to look at the effort which would be required to make the page accessible. A reasonably competent standards based designer should be able to convert this page into strict HTML with CSS design with no more than a commitment of a few hours. Can Google not spare a few hours to take care of this? Perhaps Google is over-committed to their new development to spare the time to actually perfect anything older…

If Google would just take the time to make it’s search interface accessible and standards-based it would allow this accessible search to make a much greater impact. If, in addition to that, Google would spend the time to make ALL of it’s interfaces accessible, I would consider that one of the best things since sliced bread. It’s a tiny little piece of development in comparison to the complexity of many of Google’s projects – just make those search interfaces and results pages accessible. So simple, and so needed.

A second problem is in the project tagline: "Accessible Web Search for the Visually Impaired ". There’s a big problem right there – is Google ignoring all other modes of accessibility? I understand that it’s rather a difficult prospect to identify whether a site is accessible to individuals with motor control problems or with dyslexia – but I would appreciate an acknowledgement that accessibility on the web is far more than just sites for people visual impairments.

I’m left wondering exactly how Google identifies accessible sites. In the FAQ is the statement:

Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully —– pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. […] Currently we take into account several factors, including a given page’s simplicity, how much visual imagery it carries and whether or not its primary purpose is immediately viable with keyboard navigation.

OK. Well, I’m not one-hundred percent sure what this means – can Google determine the difference between images which are accompanied by good Alt text and bad? Can they determine when images are necessary to the meaning of a page or not? This sounds much like complex pages with numerous images are candidates to immediate exclusion – but what is complexity? The visual layout can be very complex and yet contain an incredibly simple underlying structure in accessible design. It all depends on how the site has been designed to degrade or be user controlled.

I’m not expecting Google to come up with an algorithm which can definitively decide whether a page is accessible. The top experts in the field don’t always agree when it comes to a personal review of a site – it’s unreasonable to expect a search algorithm to do better. I would merely like greater transparency about the issues that Google is looking at to decide accessibility.

I applaud Google for the concept and the principles behind the Accessible Web Search, and wish them the best in making it a real, practical, and valuable resource for impaired populations. I also implore them to take their ideals to the next step and embrace web standards and accessibility in their own development and interfaces.

Free People Search PeekYou allows you to find people online – 100% Free

Looking over my site statistics the today I noticed a few referrals from a site called Search and Go. Having never heard of the site, I figured I’d check it out and see what was up. Well, turns out it’s a project which is still in beta development which intends to provide a comprehensive information portal including articles, news, a directory, and various other tools.

One of the key aspects for Search and Go (as one might conclude from the title) is that it’s intended to be fully accessible by mobile internet devices, and also has a featured directory section of sites tailored for mobile devices.

Looking at their code, I’m pretty happy – they are using very clean, semantically appropriate design. Since it’s still in beta, and the front page is clearly labeled as a work in progress, I’m not going to go out of my way to criticize the site’s layout, although I’d suggest making their navigational skip links a little more transparent. That is, possible to be made visible. There’s a very interesting article on the subject of skip links by Gez Lemon and Mike Cherim available at Accessites.org which is worth looking at on this subject.

As for my own site, I was thrilled to see it organized under the category Internet > Web Accessibility > Accessible Designers. The sheer novelty of the existence of this category is worth noting, since many directory sites take so little effort to consider accessibility as to lack a category for it entirely.

Good luck, Search and Go!

I just became aware today, through the Guild of Accessible Web Designers newsletter, of an internet directory featuring exclusively accessible web sites. This is a great way to make the accessible web more usable for individuals with disabilities – although it has its limitations.

My first reaction, of course, is that in an ideal world, this would actually be equivalent to the Open Directory Project – because, of course, eventually all sites will be accessible! But, of course, for now, this is a very meaningful directory purely because there is such a paucity of meaningfully accessible web sites.

The only thing which will make this directory truly useful, however, will be to really start filling it up with great sites. I intend to submit my own accessible sites to the directory to maximize the potential of the site.

Directories are difficult beasts – they’re huge, unwieldy, and frequently just not used that much – search is much easier. However, developing a means to specifically search for accessible sites has a target audience which can really benefit from the difference, so I hope that this directory can take off.

Limitations to the Net Guide

I said limitations, and I did mean it. The directory itself has imperfect accessibility. The search results page itself failes to validate – a minor flaw, but it’s lacking a required attribute on a Javascript block. In addition, there is no <noscript></noscript> tag set to provide information for users without Javascript support. Is this Javascript critical to the functioning of the site? No. In fact, it seems like it’s not even being used in the page – but regardless, for an accessible directory I’d have higher standards.

The design of the site is literally LITTERED with empty table cells. This is, sad to say, a classic example of a highly complex and screen reader-unfriendly table-based layout.

Many links provide only a moderate background color change to indicate that they are active; no links have a useful indication for their :active or :focus states, which is necessary for keyboard navigators to easily locate their cursor.

All in all, the site has great potential; but has not yet realized that potential. I can see that they have a good aim in mind, and I fully support that ideal – but I also hope that they are working hard to improve the usability and accessibility of their own site in order to set a positive example.