17 April 2007

Creating accessible maps to aid search engine optimisation (SEO)

Nearly every business website found will display a page that contains basic information on contact details - for instance, email addresses, telephone numbers, business addresses and often a map of directions so that potential customers can easily locate the business. This provision of information is ideal for the user: essentially, the more data you provide on your site, the greater its value.

However, many websites overlook basic factors of accessibility, which makes their site less valuable to many internet users. As the number of web users across the world continues to expand, it's becoming increasingly important for websites to design and cater their offerings to users from a wide variety of dispositions, including users with disabilities.

For instance, most modern websites will display an image of a map directing users on how to find their business location, by highlighting the route in red and providing directions and road junctions alongside the route. This information is valuable to the user (a potential customer). But how accessible is it to users with disabilities - for example, a user who suffers from a visual impairment or blindness?

Rest assured, it's simple to make directions and maps of your business location accessible to a range of user capabilities, while aiding search engine optimisation at the same time.

Ordinarily, there are three options to choose from when making your map as accessible as possible:

• Apply the Alt attribute to an image in order to tell the user what the image is conveying. From a search engine optimisation point of view, this is not ideal, as Alt attributes are not as valuable to search engines as text and the WCAG 2.0.

• Create a Descriptive Link. A D-Link is created when you place a 'd' alongside an image, and link the 'd' to a page with a further extended description of the image. Once again, from a search engine optimisation point of view, this isn't ideal as you would be losing the value of the extended description of the image to a new page.

• Add the longdescription attribute to the image. This technique is very similar to the D-Link technique, but is slightly more complicated as you may have to fiddle around with your site's HTML to implement it correctly. Additionally, the longdesc attribute is like the D-Link technique, as you need to place a link to another page containing an extended description like the D-Link. However, the difference is that you will need to view your page in code in order to add to the mark-up. Like the D-Link, this isn't best for search engine optimisation as you would be losing the value of the text to another page.

In order to provide an accessible map to disabled users while adhering to search engine optimisation purposes, we suggest you break your map down in a table-less XHTML and CSS mark-up.


























Break your map down into smaller, manageable images and then use CSS and XHTML to format it back into a structured map.




























You can then use CSS, so when a user rolls over an area of road, a small CSS built rollover window appears with all the information needed to be fully accessible.



















By making your map accessible, not only will you increase the functionality of your website, you will add additional content to your website that search engine spiders will love! The additional information you have provided to the user may account for the difference between first and second place in a search engine's organic listings.

Furthermore, your site will now have the edge over your competitors and will also appeal to users with disabilities, who are still only a minority on the web (around 2% of all internet users), but still count for very valuable traffic that can potentially convert into a sale or repeated visits.

On the mobile web

The mobile web is becoming more and more popular and, at this stage in time, maps and directions to locations constitute its main use. The advice detailed here, therefore, also applies to the mobile web, the internet and hand-held devices that do not have JavaScript and cannot view specific maps.

Home | Careers | RSS | Contact Us | Newsletter

International sites: