How to load content so it’s accessible and visible to your ideal customers
You’ve drafted helpful and engaging content for your website. It’s brimming with information to showcase your expertise. You’ve picked out unique images that bring your services to life.
Do you know how to set it up online so your ideal readers find it?
Setting up content for SEO and accessibility not only gives it the best chance of your audience finding it, but also means more people can make use of it.
What is accessible content?
Accessible content considers aspects like link format, heading structure and image alt text to assist people browsing the web with assistive technologies such as screen readers.
Plain, jargon-free English, font choice, colour contrast, video captions and text layout also benefit people with cognitive processing differences and vision impairment.
Content accessibility not only assists the one in five Australians with disability, it benefits all web users.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of preparing content so that it can be crawled, categorised and served up by search engines like Google. While SEO brings no guarantees, understanding the process gives your content a better chance of turning up for the people you want it to reach.
The good news is that SEO and accessibility complement each other. Incorporate these steps into your workflow to help your content turn up in searches by the people looking for services like yours.
Create an SEO and accessibility friendly copy deck
A copy deck is a document that contains your final approved content and instructions on how to use it.
When you outsource content to a copywriter, it might come back to you in a copy deck. If so, be sure to follow all the instructions because a thorough SEO copywriter will include important steps to maximise the content’s organic search potential.
Even if you’ve crafted the content yourself, setting it up in a copy deck saves you time when it comes to putting it on your website. It also means others know what to do if you plan to delegate the task.
What to put in a copy deck
Aside from the final approved content itself, a copy deck will include:
- page name or URL
- title tag and meta description
- correctly ordered heading tags
- main keyword and suggested synonyms
- instructions for keyword placement
- image file names
- image alt text.
I also like to note where I want specific images to go. If I’ll be working with a block builder like WordPress’s Gutenberg editor or Divi, I note where each new block will start. It helps me to organise my content for a more efficient upload.
Keywords and how to use them
Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines to find what they want or need. The words will differ depending on whether people are:
- navigating to your site
- ready to transact
- investigating and comparing options
- learning about a new topic.
This is called ‘search intent’. Your role is to identify why your audience would be looking for this piece of content. What would they type into the search engine to find something like this?
Each page of your website should have its own unique keyword or keyword phrase. You then need to optimise the content for that keyword.
Place your keywords in specific spots within your content to help the search engines understand the purpose of the content and rank it accordingly.
Where to put keywords
Make a checklist in your copy deck so you remember to add keywords to:
- page name/URL (if possible)
- title tag;
- meta description
- H1 or H2
- scattered through headings
- the first 100 words
- image file names
- alt tags (but only if it makes sense)
- descriptive, contextual links.
Entire courses are dedicated to SEO (this is the one I did). For now, we’ll focus on what keywords are, why they’re important for organic search, and how to incorporate them into your content.
How to choose your keywords
Keyword research is best done in the content planning stages so the words can be incorporated into the text. If you’re not confident doing it yourself, an SEO copywriter can assist.
When you have great content but no keyword research, a bit of retrofitting is better than nothing. The section below on the downside of retrofitting explains the difference in approaches.
Think of your keyword as the One Ring to rule them all. Choose a word or short phrase that sums up the purpose of the content. This will be your keyword for this content.
The keyword must be unique to this page. If multiple pages are optimised for the same keyword, the search engines get confused about which page to serve in the search results.
Next, think up other words or phrases that mean the same thing or similar. These are words or phrases that return similar results to your keyword when entered into a search engine. Three to five variations will be enough. These are your synonyms and will help you add variation to your content without losing the keyword’s purpose.
List your primary keyword and synonyms in your copy deck.
Heads up: the downside of retrofitting keywords
Leaving keywords out of the content planning stage means you don’t get the full benefit of research and could miss opportunities for more effective keywords.
Full keyword research uses free and paid SEO tools to look at your sector and competitors and assess how likely your content is to rank for your chosen keywords. If the competition is too high, you can look for other options.
If you choose to retrofit your keywords, understand that your content might not be fully optimised for SEO.
What retrofitting can help with is signalling to the search engines what the content is about. Quality content also builds your site’s authority (another ranking factor) and keeps people coming back.
Prepare content for SEO and accessibility
Getting all your content ready offline will make a big difference when it’s time to upload.
Optimise the page name
As shown in the screen grab below, the page name is the section of the URL, or web address, known as the pathname. This is an important spot to add your keyword if possible. Include the keyword in the URL pathname when you are creating a new page of content.
When adding content to an existing page, don’t change the page name. The old name will still exist on the internet, but now any links to it will bring up an error message.
Create the title tag and meta description
The title tag is the text that appears in the tab of your web browser. It also appears as the clickable headline in search results.
The meta description is the summary of the page that appears below the title tag in search results.
Like a heading and subheading, the title tag and meta description complement each other. Place your main keyword in the title tag and weave a synonym into the start of the meta description.
Optimising both helps improve your page’s visibility in search engines, gives people a clearer picture of what they’ll find on your site and can improve click through and time on page by capturing the attention of people interested in the content you offer.
Keep in mind there are character limits on both the title tag and meta description. Going beyond the character limits means your words will be cut off. Character limits also differ depending on whether someone is browsing on a desktop or mobile. Use a tool such as Web Yurt to check that your title tag and meta descriptions are within the character limits.
Quick tip: pay attention to the sponsored ads that come up for your keyword. This will give you an idea of how the search engines prioritise the format and wording of title tags and meta descriptions for that term.
Accessible and optimised headings
For readability, accessibility and SEO, it’s good practice to chunk your information under correctly ordered headings.
Clear heading structure helps readers scan the content for the information they need. It also breaks up the text, making it less overwhelming than a wall of words.
The order – or hierarchy – of your headings is important. In HTML code, headings carry a tag structure from H1 to H6. Think of them like nested dolls; you can’t get to the tiniest one until all the others have first come out to play.
Choose a single H1 as your main heading for a page. Some experts advise also having one H2 per page. Then organise your sections under a series of H3 headings, with any sub-sections within these sections given H4 headings, and so on.
Style the headings according to your organisation’s guidelines. It’s the code behind them that designates each respective level.
For people using assistive technology such as screen readers, correct heading order assists them to scan and navigate information to find what they need.
Correctly ordered heading tags are also a confirmed search engine ranking factor. This is because they help search engines better understand page content.
Keywords in headings
Incorporate the main keyword into either the H1 or the H2 heading. It usually makes sense for the H1 to be the same as the page name.
You can then add one of your synonyms into the H2 to create a relevant subheading. This way, the H1 and H2 headings complement and reinforce each other.
Next, sprinkle keywords or synonyms throughout your headings, but keep it natural and don’t overdo it.
Keywords in links
Another place for keywords and synonyms is in contextual links; but only if it makes sense. Contextual links are links embedded within bodies of text.
As well as supporting your SEO efforts, contextual links that are also descriptive are important for content accessibility. Avoid links with repetitive text such as ‘click here’ or ‘read more’. Instead, explain the purpose of the link. This is an example of a descriptive link taking readers to information about easy content accessibility fixes.
Search engines reward sites that create useful, quality internal links and that connect to external related content. When planning your content, look for opportunities to include relevant internal and external links to assist readers on their search journeys.
No keyword stuffing
Remember that you are writing for human readers. If you turn them away by stuffing your content with keywords, you’ll also turn away the search engines.
Some SEO tools will advise you to increase keyword density across your content up to 15 keywords per 1500 words of text. Keep in mind these recommendations are based on algorithms. Read the content. If it sounds like the keyword is popping up too often, it is.
Check for readability
About 44% of Australian adults don’t have the functional literacy skills needed to meet the typical demands of everyday life and work. This suggests that much of the population would benefit from content written at a more accessible level.
Even if your audience has higher literacy, everyone benefits from information that is straightforward and easy to understand. Writing in conversational plain English is a good target to aim for.
To achieve broad readability for Australian audiences, aim for readability of about year eight, or a person aged 14–15 years. Check your content’s readability using a free tool such as Hemingway Editor.
If you know your target audience’s literacy is lower than this, you might consider other communication models such as Easy Read or Easy English.
More readability tips include:
- use plain English that avoids jargon and complex sentences
- write in the active voice for clear, dynamic communication
- aim for one idea per sentence
- mix up sentence lengths to keep it interesting, but aim for a maximum 15–25 words
- check language complexity is suitable for readers aged 14–15 years
- limit line width to 50–75 characters, or 10–15 words of English text, to make text easier to scan
- use bold to emphasise text, not italics, underlining or capitalisation
- don’t right-justify text because the irregular spacing disrupts reading flow
- break up text with sufficient spacing, images, infographics and bullet lists.
Prepare images for SEO and accessibility
The shape, size and name of images matter. They matter for SEO and accessibility. Follow these steps to get your images web ready.
Choose images relevant to the page content
Use original images on each web page. Avoid decorative images, opting instead for images that align with the page content. This will make it easier to name the file using SEO keywords relevant to the specific page.
It also reduces irritation for people using screen readers who have to navigate through multiple images that add no value to their user experience.
Save images in an appropriate file format
The most common and best supported image formats are still JPG, PNG and GIF.
You might have heard about next gen image formats such as WebP and AVIF. These offer greater compression (reduced file size) than other formats, but not all web browsers currently support them. For now, it’s safe to stick to the most widely supported formats.
Here’s a quick rundown on what each format is best for:
- JPG is best for photographs and images with lots of colours
- PNG is used for images that need transparency and sharp clarity such as logos and graphics with text, and is usually a larger file size than JPG
- GIF is for simple animations and graphics with limited colours.
Save images in the correct file format to preserve them as you’d like them to appear online.
Make images the right shape
This is a step that can create headaches. You’ve got awesome images ready, but when you upload them to your site, they’re too big, too small or don’t fit the designated space correctly. Wide, narrow page headers can be particularly tricky.
Your web design or theme will have specific sizing and dimensions for images. Get to know these and keep them in mind when you choose images for your site. Use these dimensions to crop and resize your images before upload to save time and avoid colourful language. Or maybe that’s just me.
Tools such as Canva make this step easy. Create a canvas to match your desired size, then manipulate the image to fit. You could also try Preview on Mac or Picture Tools on Windows. There are many free image resizing tools online, including some that allow batch resizing of multiple images at once. This article previews a few options.
Compress image file size
Once images are the right shape and saved in the best format, it’s time to compress them. This step reduces the file size, which helps with page speed. Web users prefer pages that load quickly. It also signals to search engines that this is quality content, which is a tick for SEO.
Keep image file size below 200KB.
Free compression tools such as TinyPNG and Imagify.io are great for doing this before uploading.
If you want to compress images that are already loaded to your site, you could use a website plugin. Having lots of active plugins can affect your page speed, so it’s advisable to deactivate or remove them once they’ve done their job.
Give images optimised file names
Give each image a unique file name that makes sense to you, site users and search engines.
If possible, include the primary keyword in the file name of the header image. Incorporate this keyword and its synonyms into other images for the page.
Search engines crawl image file names. If they make little sense, they won’t appear in search results. Image file name protocols include:
- use hyphens for spaces in file names, never underscores
- don’t use numbers, symbols or abbreviations in file names
- don’t duplicate file names; use keyword synonyms to create variation rather than tacking a number on the end
- aim for five to six words in a file name.
Write image alt text
Image alt tags, or alt text, describe each image on your site. They are different to captions. Think of alt tags as describing an image’s purpose within the page and what it adds to the context.
If the image cannot load, the alt text will appear to describe what should be there. It’s also vital for vision impaired people to get the most out of your content. Finally, it can assist with SEO.
Preparing alt text for each image in your copy deck means you’re less inclined to leave it out when it’s time to upload. You’ll simply copy and paste the text from your copy deck into the alt text field for each image you upload.
When writing alt text, the end-user is more important than SEO. If it makes sense and adds value to include a keyword in the alt text, go ahead. If you’re shoehorning it in, leave it out.
Tips for writing effective image alt tags include:
- keep it brief and avoid unnecessary information, aiming for up to 125 characters
- don’t start with ‘image of’ or ‘picture of’ as the screen reader software automatically announced this
- include emotional impact or mood if relevant to the context
- use correct spelling and grammar
- for decorative images, leave alt text empty
- if the image is complex, such as a chart or infographic, explain briefly in the alt text, then give a longer, detailed description below the image or on a linked page.
Load your optimised and accessible content
Now that the relevant optimisation info is in your copy deck, you’re ready to load.
Upload your images
With your images already optimised, it’s a quick job to upload them to your site’s media library. All you need to do is open each image and paste your prepared alt tag text from your copy deck.
Your images are ready to add to your page.
Clean text for upload
When copying and pasting content from a word processing application such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs and into your website editor, little snips of pesky code sometimes come along for the ride. That’s why it’s good practice to clean the copy before pasting it in place.
Some website editors have built-in cleaners, but if they’re not doing the job there are other tools to try.
A helpful tool I use is HTML Cleaner. It’s a free, browser-based tool that allows you to paste content in one window and see it in HTML format in a facing window. You set your clean preferences, hit the clean HTML button, and it will tidy your text ready to be pasted onto your website.
I like to do this one section at a time. It’s easier to notice and fix issues.
Check your links
Links usually copy across without issue, but no one likes a broken link. Check your links go where they’re supposed to.
For accessibility, make sure your settings open links on the same page. In the past, we were told to make external links open in a new tab so visitors remained on your site in the original window.
The current advice is for links to open in the same window. Launching new tabs can disorient users, particularly people using assistive technology such as screen readers. Respect your users by letting them choose if they want a link to open in the same window or a new tab.
If you need to open a link in a new window, consider using a plugin that lets users know. On my site I use the free Accessibility New Window Warnings plugin by Equalize Digital. Notice the icon that appears next to that link to show users it opens a new window.
Set up the page name, title tag and meta description
Most sites have an SEO plugin or tool such as Yoast to help optimise content. Without them, you’d need to add manual HTML code to each page and create sitemaps and files to let the search engines know which content to prioritise.
While there are paid versions of Yoast, you can get most of its benefits in the free version. The tool will show you where to add the page name, title tag and meta description.
It will invite you to add a featured image for the page, which appears in search alongside the meta description.
The tool also analyses your content and gives tips on how to improve readability and SEO, assigning a green, amber or red light to your content depending on how many of its recommendations are met.
While helpful, take this traffic light system with a grain of salt. Remember, this is a piece of code, not a human. While it’s tempting (and kinda satisfying) to aim for a sea of green, remember that you are writing for humans. The tool might advise you to use more keywords in headings or use a different type of sentence structure in places. You know your audience best. Write in a way that meets their needs.
Try an accessibility checker
Like technical SEO, website accessibility is best built into a site’s foundations. If you’re planning a new site or a site revamp, include web accessibility in your plans.
If you’re like me and have a site that is not fully compliant but want to make it as accessible as possible, there are tools to help.
Try a browser extension like the WAVE web evaluation extension tool. Open any page you want to check, open the WAVE extension and it will highlight potential issues.
Google Page Speed Insights is also helpful in identifying accessibility issues and any other factors that could slow your page load.
These are handy for published posts and pages.
If you want to check for issues before hitting publish, try a plugin. I use the free version of the Equalize Digital Acccessibility Checker. It adds a dashboard to each post or page that allows me to check and assess accessibility flags.
It’s useful to have some knowledge of content accessibility – or a web developer who does – to understand and action the results or these tools. You can find out more about website accessibility and common issues in my article on easy accessibility fixes.
Organic SEO and accessibility can’t guarantee ranking
Many factors affect search visibility and optimising content is one part.
First, ensure your site is set up for SEO at a technical level. This involves your overall web structure and is your web developer’s area of expertise. Your site needs to be set up to work well on desktop and mobile, and to let search engines understand what your site is about.
Another important factor is establishing backlinks. These are links from other high authority sites back to yours. Backlinks signal to the search engines that your site is trustworthy and contains content other sites consider worth sharing.
Organic SEO is not a short-term solution. It’s part of a mid to long-term strategy aimed at building your site’s expertise, experience, authority and trust. Enhance SEO impact with other activities, such as sharing snippets of your site’s valuable content on your social media accounts and in your newsletter.
Optimised and accessible content is worth the effort
As I tell my kids, anything worthwhile takes time and effort. But you’re not my kid.
Knowing what’s involved in optimising your content for SEO and accessibility is worthwhile. It means you:
- know what’s important
- can delegate effectively
- won’t be oversold
- can delete those annoying emails from random SEO agencies.
It also empowers you to choose if it’s a job you want to take on or outsource.
Whichever route you take, you’ll never have an excuse to waste that brilliant content. Now you can develop your content with an eye to SEO and accessibility and get it in front of the people searching for services like yours.
Need a hand to get started?
Talk to me about creating SEO and accessibility friendly web content.
