When optimising your site to reach customers more effectively, why not improve on what professional search engine specialists do?

Last year was the year of search engine marketing and the experts predict the saga is going to continue full swing until at least in 2010. When you set out to work on your site’s visibility, it is useful to know what the professionals that you cannot afford to outsource the whole headache to are up to and beat them at the game. Scanning SEO news, it's pretty obvious that high search engine rankings still are the be-all-and-end-all of online marketing, but things are beginning to move on from here. The new buzzwords that stand out are accessibility and usability and renewed energy is poured in what are believed to be new opportunities in areas like local marketing. But how much bang for your buck will you get this time?

‘Accessibility!’. ‘Usability!’ Apparently that is what the professional SEO community is focusing on to get traffic numbers up for their clients. Evidence the popularity of these words themselves. A keyword tracking tool like wordtracker shows this in a matter of seconds. Over the last two months ‘accessibility’ has been scoring a count of 158 and usability more than double that number, 308. Not a lot of queries perhaps compared to a word like ‘shoes’ or ‘digital cameras’ or any tangible product you might be selling, but then –luckily- there are not as many SEO businesses out there as shoe shops.

So how do accessibility and usability factor in SEO strategies? Is it again more of the same or are you missing out on vital elements if you simply improve on your existing optimising strategies? As your strategy for online marketing is on its way and you are getting the hang of having the right keywords to describe your business, it´s time to integrate everything yet again and focus on your site´s usability and accessibility.

Usability

What is meant by usability is generally how well a site can be navigated through links, graphics and text. All your optimising efforts should have one goal in mind: attracting customers. Does your site still provide valuable information to your human visitors now that the spiders and robots can read it? This is key, say the guys at doubleclick.com, who have got good insights on what’s going on in online marketing in a broad sense. “Personalization is the hot term for relevancy, with the goal being to intertwine search with a consumer's daily activity. As clients become more sophisticated with increased demands, the marketplace will yield more efficient results. Technology will continue to be created to facilitate the massive amounts of data currently sorted by the engines”, they report. Perhaps it is totally obvious, but you would be surprised how many strategies fail simply on wording and text writing.

It’s no use optimising for search engines if the visitors to your site are not going to be impressed by what they read. Overly-complex phrasing will have to become a thing of the past and using common sense, neutral language will open up the content to a wider audience of search terms. It is best to get a copywriter to do this for you. If you are not sure whether your site needs a professional writer’s touch, there are some tools you can run over it to see if your linked terms actually make sense in the wider context. Throw your pages through this tool (free trial of seven days) and consider contacting a freelance copywriter for a quote if it appears your content is hampered; http://www.ezapplications.com/samples.htm.

There are millions of similar tools out there that can give you quite a good insight into your content. If you think your content is a mess, consider hiring a freelance copywriter to match content and keywords.

Accessibility
Accessibility of sites is way more of a technological issue. You will have what is generally considered an ‘accessible’ website if it can be read by all browsers. Providing as much ‘access’ to your site/content as possible perhaps has a number of added dimensions that you are not aware of and it is good to pay notice to every aspect of the matching between your content and the search engines.
The various limitations of browsers other than Internet Explorer and Netscape are quite distinct and need paying attention to during this stage of your optimisation efforts. For instance, the Lynx browser is a text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS, images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content. There are various tools that replace images in the form of ALT text, JavaScript through the