Site Optimization: Key Points to Remember - Accessibility Problems and Fixes
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Spiders and site visitors hate encountering broken links. If an HTML link is broken, how can they find the page's content? It's impossible. Some SEOs believe that search engines lower the rankings on sites and pages that have many broken page links. Do yourself and your visitors a favor: check your links regularly. There are tools that can automate this process.
When you are coding the HTML and CSS for your website, please keep in mind that it must meet certain minimum requirements to function well and display successfully. Only after meeting those requirements will your site's pages be spidered and properly indexed by the search engines. There is some debate about whether your site's HTML and CSS must be fully in accordance with all of the guidelines laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but it surely couldn't hurt. You can learn more about these guidelines at http://www.w3.org/; the site includes free services for validating your HTML and CSS code.
There are at least two reasons why you want to pay close attention to the forms and applications you include in your website. First of all, if anything blocks content from being reached via direct hyperlinks, search engines may never find it. That could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whether you want it to be found. (And it's worth remembering that not only form submissions can block content, but other input-required elements, such as select boxes and JavaScript, can block content as well).
Likewise, if your forms do not function well, your site visitors may get frustrated and go elsewhere. As with the search engines not finding content that you really want them to find, this is a bad thing. It can't be said often enough: users do not like sites that don't work. So make sure that the functionality of every item on your website that requires input from a visitor is checked before going live, and consider carefully the effect of blocking that content from search engines.
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