seo

Posted by LoganRay

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

Every SEO knows 301 redirects are necessary from time to time. But are they affecting your other optimization efforts by slowing down page load time? Or are they sending bots on a wild goose chase? How many 301s are out there that you don’t need anymore?

Before I jump into this list, let me take you back to where this started: I was in a development meeting for one of our clients. This meeting had nothing to do with SEO. But, as usual, the discussion quickly sparked a few SEO considerations.

This client, a manufacturer of home goods, is particularly sensitive about the load time of their site, and rightfully so. They’ve got a lot of hi-resolution imagery on their site; therefore, every possible measure to minimize load time must be taken.

One of the proposed initiatives to cut load time was removing all 301 redirects. That got my attention.

There was no way I was going to let that happen. I knew some of their redirects were necessary for — well, scratch that. I wasn’t sure how valuable they were or how many people were hitting them. I had no quantitative data to support my position.

I convinced them to leave all redirects in place until a viable solution was put in place. I obviously needed to collect some data to demonstrate how important 301 redirects can be. But how was I going to identify which ones needed to stay?

I wanted a solution that would provide the data in a format that we (as the marketers/analysts) could easily access without stepping on the toes of development or IT.

Google Analytics was the obvious choice. As I was hashing out the solution for the redirect removal conundrum (details on this in No. 3 below), I noticed several other items that were affecting the load time of this site: internal links pointing to outdated URLs (which had then been 301’ed) and rel=canonicals with 301’ed URLs.

Basically, every redirect-related issue that could exist did.

After fixing these issues, we were able to effectively decrease the redirection time of the site.

The development team was stoked, the SEO team was excited that our (necessary] 301s got to stay, and the client was thrilled with load time.

These changes were put into place between July and August of 2015. I think the results speak for themselves:

Here are the four ways redirects could be hurting your SEO efforts:

1. You have redirect chains
2. Your internal linking steps through redirects
3. You have unnecessary 301s
4. You have canonical tags that 301

1. You have redirect chains

Let’s start out with a simple definition: A redirect chain is a series of redirects that go from one URL after another, forcing people and search engines to wait until there are no more redirects to step through. Here’s an example: www.mysite.com/responsive redirects to www.mysite.com/responsive-web-design, which then redirects to www.mysite.com/rwd.

Of course, we all know the implication this has on passing authority. For every step in a redirect chain, about 10% of authority is lost. But it’s also important to acknowledge how this would drastically increase page load time and decrease the overall quality of your site. A standard single-step redirect is already having an impact on your load time, then add to that the fact that some redirects may be going through multiple iterations just to call one URL.

It’s no surprise that 301s stack up over time and create these chains: You put in this redirect, your coworker adds another, and a few months later you stack another one on top. These things happen.

So how do you identify these chains? Luckily, our friends at Screaming Frog have built ridiculously simple feature into their tool that tracks down redirect chains and outputs them in a report. Here’s how to use it:

• Run a full site crawl with Screaming Frog
• Go to > Reports > Redirect Chains

That’s it. Seriously.

Analyzing which ones you need to fix is slightly more involved than pulling the report. The only thing that makes this more difficult is the fact that ALL of the links on your site are factored in. This means that if you link out to another site and they’ve got a chain in place, it finds that as well (see red highlighting in the screenshot below). One of the common themes of URL types I’ve seen here is social sharing URLs; they change frequently, so they’ll need to be filtered out of the report. In column B, identify your own domain (see green highlighting) and remove all the other rows.

Once this is done, it’s pretty smooth sailing and you can update your 301 redirects to remove those unnecessary steps. Don’t send them to your dev or IT team yet, though. Keep reading for more useful nuggets.

2. Your internal linking steps through redirects

The second way redirects could be hurting your SEO efforts is via internal links pointing to URLs that are redirected elsewhere.

To get a handle on what’s going on with your site, follow these simple tips:

• Visit the Google Search Console and download the full list of your internal links.
• Go to Search Traffic > Internal Links and click the “Download this Table” button. Once you’ve done that, open the doc and use the concatenate function in Excel to append your domain to the beginning of those URL strings.

Once you have that column of your full URLs, copy the whole list. Here’s how to use that clipboard info to populate a crawl in Screaming Frog:

• In the menu bar, go to “Mode” and change it to “List.” Then, click “Upload List” and “Paste.” This will run a crawl of only the URLs from the Internal Link report.
• Once complete, check the status code column for any 301s. If you see any, select that URL and go to the Inlinks tab in the lower left of Screaming Frog. This will show you all the pages that contain a link to that redirecting URL.

Once you’ve identified all redirecting internal links, get your list together for updates to send over to your development team.

3. You have unnecessary 301 redirects

Websites tend to collect 301 redirects over the years, and no one really thinks to clean them up. When your .htaccess file starts to run deep with redirects, your load time suffers. Each time a URL is called by a browser, every single one of those redirects is checked to see if the requested URL needs to be sent elsewhere. The absolutely kills your load time.

But how do you identify which of those redirects are actually needed? UTM tags, that’s how.

By appending UTMs to the resolving URLs of redirects, you can easily identify which 301 redirects are actually used on a regular basis.

Here’s an example of the tagging methodology I use:

/old-page >>> /new-page?utm_medium=301&utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=/old-page

This will send data to Google Analytics every time someone hits one of your redirects and give it the attribution information you’ve included in your UTMs.

Download a Google Sheet with my tag generator. To save it locally, go to File > Download As > Microsoft Excel (.xlsx).

Twice a year, I’ll go into Google Analytics and view the Source/Medium Report and apply an in-line filter for 301s.

From here, simply pull a list of redirects that were triggered and compare that to the list of 301s in the .htaccess file. Any that weren’t hit should get removed.

Side note: If you run an e-commerce site, you can demonstrate the importance of 301 redirects by showing how much revenue was saved by having redirects in place.

4. You have canonical tags that 301

The logic behind this one requires little explanation, as it’s basically the same as having redirect chains. You don’t want to have canonical tags that point to redirected URLs. To identify these canonical tags, run your Screaming Frog crawl and go to the Directives tab. Scroll to the right to find the “Canonical Link Element 1” column and copy the list.

Re-crawl using List Mode and find any that have a Status of 301.

Bonus: Regaining links via 301s

If you have a large site, or your site has had a few URL structural changes over the years, chances are pretty good you’ve got some decent links pointing to a dead URL.

Run an Open Site Explorer report and grab the list of target URLs.

Drop that list into Screaming Frog using the same “Upload List” method described above. If you see any errors in the Status Code column, 301 redirect the URLs. (Make certain to check the stats and quality of those links first.)

Join in the conversation below if you have other redirect-related issues to add to this list, or other methods for identifying and troubleshooting these problems.

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Posted by randfish

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

Success isn’t an overnight phenomenon when it comes to SEO, but with the right process and a dose of patience, it’s always within reach — even if you’re running your own blog. Optimizing your blog posts begins as early as the inception of your idea, and from then on you’ll want to consider your keyword targeting, on-page factors, your intended audience, and more. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand spells out a step-by-step process you can adopt to help increase search traffic to your blog over time.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about blog post SEO, specifically how to nail the on-page optimization process, the thought process, the strategy process, the content creation and optimization for a blog post. So if you are writing a blog, there are a bunch of things that you need to do to be great at SEO, and there are some steps that I think you can follow.

This is not one of those things where I’m going to say, “Oh, you absolutely have to follow this from end to end for every post that you write, and it’s a big, formal, complex process.” A lot of this can be done in your head before you start writing the post, before you start creating it. That’s totally okay. This does not have to add a ton of layers of involvement. But if you use this process as you’re creating each post, which I do many, many times for Whiteboard Friday, this blog post that you’re reading and watching right now, and for all the posts that I write, it can be hugely helpful and eventually transformative in your ability to get search traffic to your blog.

Step 1: Determine the post’s goals

So let’s start. First off, as you should always do, you should determine what the goal of the post is. You should have that in your head or written down before you start creating the post. So that could be:

• Attract a new audience in this particular sphere.
• Convince and win over people to my perspective on a particular topic.
• I’m really trying to promote a product or service with this post.
• Share some important news about my organization or my company.
• Share something that’s happening in my sphere.
• Contributing to a conversation that already exists out in the blogosphere or the social media world or the news world in your space.
• Answer a question or earn influencer amplification.

Whatever it is, make sure you know what it is before you go into the post. I hate to see folks starting with step three, like doing keyword research when they have no idea what the post goals are.

One thing before we skip to step two is once you know what you’re trying to do here, determine the metric or metrics that matter the most to that goal. So for example, a metric could be visits, just raw traffic. It could be engagement on the post. It could be comments. It could be links.

It could be social shares, because you’re trying to reach a new audience that’s on LinkedIn. You haven’t done very well on LinkedIn in the past, but you think this post is perfectly targeted to that.

Or you’re only really trying to get one or two people’s attention, particular influencers, in which case your metric might be: Did they come and read it? Did they share it? If the answer to that is yes, you’ve accomplished the post’s goals. But you need that metric recorded.

Step 2: Determine the audience you need to reach

Related, determine the audience you’re trying to reach with the post. So that could be potential new readers. It could be existing loyal fans. “Yay,” he’s waving a flag. It could be influencers, folks who have the ability to broadcast your message, and maybe you’re not even trying to attract them to broadcast this particular message, you just want their attention so in the future you can reach them.

Or it might be very specific audience targets, in this case my backpacker readers. Moz does that all the time. For example, I might do a Whiteboard Friday that is specifically for e-commerce websites or specifically for B2B folks. I’m focusing on a particular audience target with that content.

Step 3: Do your keyword research

Now we’re going to do our keyword research, because we know what we’re trying to accomplish and who we’re trying to reach. So we’re going to try and find three to five keyword phrases to target. Why three to five? Because generally, that’s what you can reasonably expect to be able to reach with a single blog post. I’ll talk a little bit more about on-page optimization in a sec.

I’m looking for, as we’ve talked about in our keyword research-focused Whiteboard Friday just a few weeks ago, which you should check out if you haven’t already, we want relatively high volume, low difficulty, high click-through rate opportunity. Meaning, there is a good number of people who search for it, it’s not that hard to potentially rank for, and there are not too many other features in the search result that are going to take away from my potential ability to rank with web content.

If there are, by the way, lots of people who have images or lots of people who have videos in this search result or lots of news content, then you want to think about, “How do I get my post to include those?” I might think about, “Hey, maybe this post should be very visually centric, or maybe this post should be a video.” “Or maybe this post should try and get into Google News.” “Can I get my blog into Google News?” If I can’t, maybe I want to find someone whose platform I can publish on to get into Google News.

All the keywords that you target should have the same searcher intent. What do I mean by searcher intent? I mean that the people who search for those three to five terms and phrases are all trying to accomplish the same goal or very, very similar goals.

So an example might be, if someone is searching for “luxury kids clothes,” that is likely very, very similar to someone searching for “designer children’s fashion,” or “haute couture kids brands.” They all have the same intent. They are thinking about purchasing, or investigating at least what brands in the fashion space offer children’s clothing, and they’re all in the luxury, high-end, haute couture, high-priced space. Perfect. These are all matching that searcher intent.

Step 4: Conduct competitive research

I want to conduct my competitive research. This is where I’m going to go ask questions like:

• “Who else is ranking for this keyword?” I can just go to Google, take a look at that, or I could look at the SERPs analysis through something like Keyword Explorer.
• “Who has produced heavily shared content in this space?” So not necessary who’s ranking, but who’s had lots of shares and likes on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Pinterest, all that kind of stuff. BuzzSumo is great for this. You can also use Moz Content’s Search tool. Once you know the answers to these two, you need to determine…
• “What is it that’s the unique value that I can bring to the table with my blog post?” Unique value meaning not just unique content. Obviously, what you write is going to be different than what other people have written or created. But how are you providing value that is different from what other people have provided?

Is that because your opinions are very unique? Is it because you are providing a better experience? Is it because you’re providing that content in a different format? Is it because you have access to unique researcher data? Whatever those things are, you need to answer that question because we’re trying to go above and beyond what else is out there.

Step 5: Create your post

I’m going to go ahead and create the post, and this is where a lot of that research comes into play. Because I know what my post goals are and who I’m targeting, and some of the keyword research and what people are looking for around this topic, as well as what’s already out there, I can now make a post that is unique and uniquely valuable. This is huge, because it means that my post has much greater potential to reach its audience and to perform well, and to be perceived by both searchers and search engines, as well as sharers and influencers and folks on social media, as much more worthwhile.

I also want to think about, in here, the types of content that I want. So written content is pretty obvious for most blog posts. But I should also think about things like images and graphs or data, video. Do I want to embed content from other places, maybe SlideShare, or I want to embed some rich media file?

Or maybe I want to link to other places out there. Maybe some people have produced content on this and I would like to get their attention, and I would like to reference their work, and so I’m going to link over to them. Maybe I want to embed some quotes or get some quotes from some notable folks about the particular topic or get other opinions for the piece. All of that type of stuff I should think about as I create the post.

Step 6: On-page SEO/keyword targeting

This is the on-page SEO portion. So I’m going to take those three to five terms, and I’m going to think about one of those as the primary keyword phrase that I’m targeting. That’s going to be the one that goes exactly matched in the title and the headline and the URL. I’m also going to think about two to four secondary keywords that I want to attempt to wrap into potentially the meta description and image alt tags and the content itself. I’m going to try and use these keywords intelligently in places like title, URL, meta description, headline, content, images, all those spots.

Then I want to consider any old URLs that I might redirect here. So let’s say that perhaps I have done a blog post on this topic in the past six months ago or two years ago. Do I want to redirect that old post to this one? Or are there posts that I should go out there and find, or content anywhere on my site or on any site that I control or influence, where I want to link to this content, this new post that I’m writing now that I’ve created it? This can be helpful for discovery. It can also be helpful for internal linking, helpful to your audience who’s reading your old stuff, and helpful to search engines to find, index, and hopefully rank your new content.

Step 7: Craft an outreach + amplification plan

I need some way to do outreach and amplification, and I want to plan for that. So the questions I’m asking here are:

Who do I want to reach? Who do I think will help me amplify this?

How am I going to target them? How am I going to reach out to them? Is it going to be via email? Is it going to be via Twitter? Am I going to see them in person? Do I have a direct relationship? Do I need an introduction? Do I want to comment on something that they have done, whatever that might be?

When should I do that? Do I want to do it beforehand, because I’m trying to get them to look at the content or contribute something to it prior? Or do I want to do it after I’ve published it and promoted it, and why?

Meaning, why is this person going to help me? What does it do for them or for their audience? Does it make them look good? Is it something that in the past they have shared lots of things like this, but this one is uniquely valuable or better, or provides new information that they didn’t have before? You need an answer to all of those questions when you create that plan.

Step 8: Experiment, learn, & iterate

I’m going to experiment, I’m going to learn, and I’m going to iterate on this. So look, in this process, some of these things, for a big, big post you might spend a lot of time on each of these steps very thoroughly. For a post that’s sort of a toss-away, quick opinion, I’m trying to write it in an hour or less and get it published, maybe I’m just thinking about these things in my head and doing real fast keyword research and targeting, and the rest of it’s sort of just a mental model that I have. But regardless of that, I’m going to expect that this process is going to be repeated dozens of times, 30, 40, 50, 70 times even, before I should expect my first success, especially if you’re a new blog or new blogger, and that I’m going to have to do it hundreds of times before I’ll have a relatively high hit or a high success rate, where lots of your posts are doing well and earning you rankings and ongoing traffic and social shares.

This is not something where you follow this process and you have instant results with your first post. That’s not the case. No one has that in blogging. That’s just not how it works. You’re going to launch, promote, analyze, apply the information that you learn, and launch again. This process is going to happen over and over, and the more you learn and apply, the better you’re going to get at this system.

All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by EricaMcGillivray

[Estimated read time: 3 minutes]

Every year, we take great pleasure in accepting pitches and having community speakers grace our stage. Our community speakers represent a unique opportunity, and our MozCon audience has a lot of love for them.

This year, we’ll have four speakers!

The basic details:

• To submit, just fill out the form below.
• Please only submit one talk! We want the one you’re most excited about.
• Talks must be about online marketing and are only 15 minutes in length.
• Submissions close on Sunday, June 12th at 5pm PDT.
• Final decisions are final and will be made in late June.
• All presentations must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct.
• You must attend MozCon in person, September 12–14 in Seattle.

Everyone who submits a community speaker pitch will be informed either way.

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Community speakers get the following:

• 15 minutes on the MozCon stage for a keynote-style presentation, plus 5 minutes of Q&A.
• A free ticket to MozCon. (If you already have one, we’ll either refund or transfer the ticket to someone else.)
• Four nights of lodging covered by us at our partner hotel.
• A reimbursement for your travel (flight, train, car, etc.), up to $500 domestic and $750 international.
• A free ticket for you to give to anyone you would like and a code for $300 off another ticket.
• An invitation for you and your significant other to join us for the speakers’ dinner.

If you’re curious about what the process look like, Zeph Snapp wrote about his experiences as a community speaker.

How do you pick speakers?

We have a small selection committee of Mozzers who review each and every pitch. We start off by reviewing only topics without biographical details, which ensures our first commitment to making sure topics match our audience. Then we look at everything for a holistic view of what you might bring to the stage.

Things to consider for your pitch:

• Read my post on how to prepare for speaking, from pitching to the actual gig.
• Review the topics already being presented on at MozCon to avoid overlap and get inspiration.
• Focus your pitch on online marketing. MozCon is all about actionable information.
• Your pitch is for MozCon organizations, so detail what you’re talking about. We need to know the actual tactics you’ll be sharing.
• Keep within the word limits of the forms. Tricky submissions — like linking to Google Docs for more words — will be disqualified.
• Do not ask speaker selection committee members to evaluate your pitch before submitting it.
• No amount of lobbying on social media will positively affect your chances at being selected.
• Bonus: make sure to link to a video of you presenting and past slide decks.

Feeling a bit nervous?

Every speaker at MozCon gets direction on topics and reviews of content and slide decks. We work hard to make sure our audience will love your talk. We encourage pitches from speakers of all backgrounds, knowledge levels, and speaking experiences. At MozCon, we believe in diversity of voices and helping grow speakers in their careers.

We’re happy to help, including:

• Calls to discuss and refine your topic.
• Assistance honing topic title and description.
• Reviews of outlines and drafts (as many as you want!).
• Best practices and guidance for slide decks, specifically for our stage.
• A comprehensive, step-by-step guide for show flow.
• Serving as an audience for practicing your talk.
• Reviewing your final deck.
• Sunday night pre-MozCon tour of the stage to meet our A/V crew, see your presentation on the screens, and test the clicker.
• A 15-person dedicated crew to make your A/V outstanding.
• Anything else we can do to make you successful!

Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

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Posted by Laura.Lippay

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

(header photo “Kenzie” by H.L.W. from the Blind Photographers Flickr Group.)

Search engine optimization (SEO) evolved by search engines creating algorithms to automate the classification and ranking of websites, with SEOs manipulating the loopholes in those algos.

Accessibility, on the other hand, is born out of a desire to be inclusive; to connect humans to information through assistive technology (AT).

When we strip down both industries to where a machine is reading a web page, there are a few overlaps. That’s what we’re looking at in this series. If you’re optimizing for search engines, you’re also affecting how people using screen readers and assistive technologies are experiencing your site.

In today’s post on accessibility + SEO, we’re digging into on-page aspects that include formatting text, colors, links, and content that we can’t see see but machines can. The previous post covered structure overlaps, and we’ll cover images, video, and non-text elements in the last post following this one.

Hidden text

There are times when something that can be seen on the page provides information or context that isn’t able to be read by bots or screen readers, like in an infographic image. The text, graphs, and overall context are all in the image, so in this case, you’d want to provide text that screen readers and bots can use for information and context — either visibly or hidden.

There may also be other reasons you want to actively hide text from all visible display, but not from bots or screen readers. An example might be a paragraph that expands to show more text only when clicking on a caret. In this case, the text is hidden by default from the visual experience, but you want to make sure that screen readers and bots can get it.

This table below shows how each of these different methods of hiding content is perceived by sighted users, screen readers and search engines. I’m not an accessibility expert, so if you know of anything different or additional, please do share.

Hidden text method	Who can see the default content with each method?
	Sighted visitors	Screen readers	Google* (links are examples of Google caching this method)
Visibility:hidden	No	No	Yes
Display:none	No	No	Yes
Text-indent: -10000	No	Yes	Yes
CSS clip	No	Yes	Yes
Positioning off-screen in CSS	No	Yes	Yes
HTML 5 hidden	No	No	?
ARIA-hidden=”true”	Yes	Some	?

*I’d highly recommend not using these hidden text techniques solely for spam, as Google may index hidden text, but doesn’t give hidden text the same weight or ranking effect as non-hidden text, and if it’s abused and has to be manually reviewed, you could find yourself in some trouble.

On that note, let’s dig into two actual common examples: one where the primary content is in an image, so we need to make hidden content available to screen readers and bots, and a second where the primary content is hidden from users by default, and we need to make sure screen readers and bots find it.

Providing text for an infographic

Here’s an example SEOs will love of an infographic where we want to provide the infographic information and context to the screen reader and search engines. The simple way would be to add the text to the page below the infographic, like in this example.

But Ted Drake is an accessibility genius (who has been invaluable with his help in this post series and my interest in a11y in general — thank you Ted), and has also shown us an option to provide the information for screen readers and bots that is invisible to sighted users. The infographic is pulled into a page (or easily shared) via an iFrame and, in addition to the infographic image, that iFrame HTML has all of the descriptive text in clipped content, invisible to the sighted user reading the same content via the infographic, but fully legible and interactive for screen readers and bots that can’t read the infographic.

Check it out for yourself. This page appears in Google search results for the infographic text “The days are longer, but you’re still not able to find time to plan those much-needed getaways.” That text does not actually appear visually on the page.

Side note: Notice that the one with the text on the page, the example I provided above, is ranking higher than the visible text one for me.

In this hidden text example, the infographic itself is an image provided on a separate HTML page with the text information in a 1px CSS clip, pulled into that page in the search results via an iFrame.

At first glance the separate HTML page looks like it only has an image on it, but you’ll see in the code that there is also text hidden in a “visually-hidden” CSS class that clips the content, and this text has semantic markup allowing screen reader users to navigate through it, copy text, etc., making it a highly usable, interactive alternative to having the text right on the page.

See it in action with the VoiceOver screen reader here:

Since I know this is going to cause a lot of excitement among the more spam-bent SEOs reading this, I’ll also mention that those who control the spam-tweaking at Google are also aware of this method, and even this specific example. While they’re confident their processes for specifically combating hidden text spam are strong, I can only show this example in good conscience by also saying don’t spam. Google is watching. Do consider this method for accessibility and especially for sharing infographics along with the text content.

Hiding ancillary text

There are times when you want to show the sighted user some text, but have them click something like a caret to expand for more text content if they choose (or skim by it and move on to whatever else is on the page).

I’ve done site audits where the functionality was there (for sighted users), but the content wasn’t indexed because of the way it was coded. You can use display:none for the default content that’s hidden, which will hide the extra content from screen readers and sighted users skimming through the page, but allow access to that content if the caret or link is clicked by either user.

Here’s an example where the Netflix Help pages hide content from the sighted visitor and screen reader unless the visitor chooses to expand and access the content. It’s using display:none in the CSS. It’s accessible to screen readers and sighted visitors and the caret content is indexed by search engines. Win-win-win.

Hidden text do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t use hidden text for spam. Stuffing hidden keywords into a page is not recommended if you want to keep your nose clean for SEO, and can be a terrible experience for screen reader visitors.
• Do consider sighted and non-sighted audiences: If you need to hide text, consider which method is best to use depending on whether you want a screen reader to see it and a sighted user not to, or if you want all visitors not to.

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a mostly old-school SEO practice that still lingers. It is/was very popular on pages where the site is very image-heavy, on old Flash pages, or even on pages with normal content but where the developer wants more text-based keywords on the page. This is done just for search engines, so why do we care if visitors other than screen readers come across it?

Luckily it’s harder to find good keyword stuffing examples these days, so @Joeartdotcom sent me a perfect archived example of a 2007 Patagonia home page with a big image, minimal content, and a bunch of “Search Index Page Description” text. Listen to it via a screen reader (like ChromeVox for Chrome or Fangs for Firefox). Sighted readers can see the text on this Wayback Machine page if you’d like to read along, or just listen to this video.

Keyword stuffing hopefully isn’t as big of an issue as it was back in 2007, but it’s nonetheless still an option, and it’s very likely to annoy your screen reader users.

Keyword stuffing do’s and don’ts

• Do think ahead when building: Avoid having to keyword-stuff to attract search engines to begin with, and build accessible pages with relevant, indexable text information.
• Do write naturally. It’s best for everyone, and this can be done using keywords but not abusing keywords.

Size and color contrast of text

People will often use small fonts and low contrast text simply for page aesthetics. SEOs will sometimes use low-contrast small font text to add more keywords to a page without distracting from the rest of the content.

It’s not something I’ll get into detail here, but search engines can consider font size and color. They know what we’re all up to.

Here’s where this can be problematic beyond SEO. Colorblind or color vision-deficient readers may be unable to distinguish certain colors or only see things in black and white or gray shades, and these deficiencies can be mild or severe.

This video shows some color contrast examples that are tough even for readers without color deficiencies.

Additionally, low-vision readers may be elderly readers or may suffer from conditions that affect their vision like glaucoma or macular degeneration, and have difficulty perceiving content that is too small, that doesn’t scale, or is low contrast. Here are some great low-vision examples.

To get a good sense of how assistive technologies can help in these cases, check out this demo of the very cool ZoomText screen magnifier, which can also change color contrast, create cross-hairs or a giant circle on your mouse pointer, and highlight cursor focus or active area focus.

Some people, like legally blind student Kim Russell, are using ZoomText at 12–14x magnification to navigate your site. That’s huge.

There are a lot of font and color do’s and don’ts to keep in mind when you’re designing your pages and/or when you’re considering that extra small, low-contrast text. Check the resources section for a lot more interesting tools and details beyond the do’s and don’ts listed here.

Text size and color do’s and don’ts

• Don’t use text as an image. When possible use actual text rather than text graphics to avoid pixelation when these text images are enlarged.
• Don’t rely solely on color to portray information. Users should be able to understand the content if all colors were removed. If link text is indicated only by the fact that it’s red, red-sensitive colorblind users may not see the links. Underlines on links are more visible, regardless of link color.
• Do maximize the contrast of text. This includes logo text and text in images when possible. Use color contrast tools to find good foreground-to-background contrast of at least 4.5:1 for small text and 3:1 for large text. For example, #757575 is the lightest grey that is accessible on a white background.
• Do use relative font sizes vs absolute. Sizing fonts by relative percent or em sizes can allow for better resizing than absolute sizing via pixels or points.
• Do use readable fonts: Try to stay away from cursive, fantasy (decorative), and monospace fonts (ex: Courier), and stick closer to native serif and sans-serif family fonts, utilizing as few different font faces as possible for continuity.

Links and anchor text

Screen reader users often tab through a page to skim the page by its links. The link anchor text is announced at each instance, also announcing “link” along with the anchor text, and the user can hit enter to follow any link in focus.

Descriptive and informative links

Links with descriptive anchor text are a win for search engines and screen readers. When the link describes what it is pointing to, it provides context to both, telling screen reader users tabbing through links what the link points to and, for SEO, providing context as to what the destination page is about and potentially helping that destination rank for that phrase or topic.

Providing context with links can be helpful for screen readers as well. Check out the video below of navigating this example of a webpage created to show bad accessibility. The first logo link is pretty amusing, but also notice the [image description] links, the MORE>> links that don’t provide any context and aren’t connected to the articles that they’re visually connected to on the page, and the infamous “click here” and “read more” links, a familiar downer for SEOs.

Now compare that to this video of a properly created version of the same webpage, navigating much more smoothly through it via headers and links:

And just because you have to see this one to believe it, here’s an example of navigating through the links on my favorite accessibility horror story website:

Avoid pseudo links and buttons

While this isn’t necessarily an SEO overlap, it’s a vast problem for accessibility that is worth calling out in this article. Using the correct markup to create links and buttons is important to make sure those links and buttons are clickable using assistive technologies. The simple rule is to use links to navigate to other places and buttons to initiate an action, and do not use <span> or <div> for these cases as they are not the proper markup and may not work.

Karl Groves has a great writeup on the differences, with some examples and why they’re problematic.

Breadcrumb links

SEOs like our breadcrumb links because, well, they’re links. And they’re keyword-rich. But to screen readers, the absence of context around breadcrumb links can be confusing.

Consider the hidden text methods we looked at earlier to provide a little extra context to screen readers like the text “you are here”:

Listen for the hidden “you are here” in the video below, tabbing through the WebAIM invisible content page.

Link anchor text do’s and don’ts

• Don’t keyword stuff your links. Let’s say you have a Seattle-focused website with an article announcing the opening of a new coffee shop. You spam the article every chance possible with linked phrases like “coffee shop” and “Seattle coffee shop” and “coffee shop in Seattle” that all link to the coffee shop website. This article is no fun to read for anyone, sighted or not. Don’t do it.
• Do create descriptive links. When you’re using a screen reader you can tab just through the links on the page. If all of the links say “here,” it’s not very useful for someone using a screen reader who is trying to find a link on the page to something specific.
• Do use proper link and button markup. Divs and spans are not links or buttons, and empty <a> anchors without an href attribute or with an empty hashtag destination <a href=”#”> are all potentially problematic.
• Do consider explaining breadcrumb links. Consider hiding a bit of explanatory text offscreen, like “you are here,” before your breadcrumb links for screen readers.

Resources and tools:

If you know of other good tips or resources, please share with us in the comments.

Text formatting

• Nice article with steps to use color contrast tools and create palette examples
• W3C Minimum Contrast
• ContrastRebellion.com – examples of low contrast & high contrast text & general spread-the-word awareness that contrast matters
• WebAIM Color Contrast Checker web-based tool
• Great low vision examples
• WebAIM: fonts for accessibility

Hidden text

• Techniques for hiding text
• Clip Your Hidden Content For Better Accessibility
• Tool to experiment with CSS clipper
• HTML5 Accessibility Chops: hidden and aria-hidden
• WCAG Contrast Checker browser extension for Firefox
• Color Contrast Analyzer browser extension for Chrome’
• WebAIM: Invisible Content

Links and anchor text

• W3C: Providing link text that describes the purpose of a link for anchor elements
• Links and Hypertext
• Links are not buttons. Neither are DIVs and SPANs

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Posted by rachelgooodmanmoore

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Do you suffer from average ROI and low-to-moderate page optimization scores? Do you feel like your SEO has lost its spark? Have you sensed there’s something “missing” from your digital marketing strategy? If this sounds like you or someone you know, then have I got some good news for you:

Announcing Moz’s new and improved workshops and training!

Whoa! Let’s check it out!

If you’ve been looking for a way to improve your marketing strategy and get better results for you or your clients, then Moz’s new training and workshops could be the solution for you.

Great! Wait… what?

Chris Pratt

Great question, reader and Chris. Training and workshop sessions are comprehensive, in-depth, interactive classes designed to help you unleash your inner marketing super power. Every class comes coupled with activities like conducting a full website audit, competitive research exercises, keyword brainstorms, and more. Sound like fun? You bet it does. Almost as much fun as these guys are having:

Training AND workshops? What’s the difference?

Glad you asked. Here’s the run-down on what workshops and training are all about:

Workshops are small group classes lead by a member of the Moz Academy team. They’re open to both Moz subscribers and non-subscribers alike (though it helps to have a Moz subscription or trial), and cover best practices and real-world applications for topics like website audits, keyword research, content marketing, and more.

Not just a one-sided webinar, these sessions are meant to be interactive and participants have numerous opportunities to ask questions and dig deeper. What’s more: every student who attends a workshop will leave with a custom worksheet, audit, or other interactive tool.

Access to worksheets and other in-class activities are included in the price of each workshop.

Custom training is just that: fully customized one-on-one or small group training sessions for organizations who want specialized, focused attention from Moz trainers. Custom training curricula can be designed around whatever SEO and traffic generation topics YOU want to learn about, and individual training sessions are customized to your unique business and industry. Prefer to learn in person, in a real classroom setting? Ask if we can come to you!

The best part of both training AND workshops? You’ll leave each session with not only more know-how, but also an actionable plan for how you can improve your strategy moving forward.

Paid training?! From Moz?!

One of the other things that separates these workshops and trainings from other web-based content Moz has provided in the past: they’re paid. We feel these trainings offer a unique experience for attendees that’s worth the investment, but this is, admittedly, a different route for us. To that end, I wanted to provide some transparency as to why we’ve chosen to offer paid training.

The first (and biggest) reason why we decided to go the paid training route? Customers asked for it. Here are a few examples:

“Does Moz offer Professional Services?”

“We are seeking your support and consultancy on what needs to be done on our website in order to rank higher. If that will cost extra, we will pay. Please advise.”

“How much [would it cost] for me to ask you a lot of questions for an hour? I know you guys are the best…would like to do it on the phone…a conference call would be best.”

Despite requests like these, we’d always shied away from offering paid education because of the vast number of free resources we already offer. With educational materials like the Moz Blog, Whiteboard Fridays, our Beginner’s Guides, and beyond, we weren’t sure a paid option would be valuable or useful for users like you.

But as comprehensive as Moz’s free resources may be, they all share two things in common: 1.) They’re self-guided learning tools and 2.) many are one-size-fits-all. Let’s dive into each one of those a bit deeper:

An alternative to self-guided learning

While self-guided learning is great for some, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution for all learning styles. Depending on how you learn best, self-serve resources to organize, peruse, and internalize at your own pace can either be the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest hurdle to actually learning something new.

To ensure we have a great option for everyone who wants to learn how to get more traffic, we created comprehensive paid trainings that combine an engaging experience with a hands-on activity to help attendees apply the topic at hand to solve a real life pain-point for their organizations.

From a learning modality perspective, this means we’re able to provide resources for all types of learners — even those who learn best from actually doing an activity at hand.

When one-size-fits-all education isn’t enough

Best practices are just that — the best practice to employ for most organizations in most scenarios. But many organizations have their own nuances and specific business cases — and for those folks, one-size-fits-all education and strategy shop talk isn’t always going to address the underlying issue or provide the best solution.

And sometimes, you may feel like this user:

…I know I have, more times than I can count.

To provide a solution for those who feel like one-size-fits-all education isn’t enough for their organization, our custom training option allows us to tailor a unique education program to your specific needs, use cases, and business.

At the end of the day, we believe the live interaction with our trainers and hands-on activities in each session make workshops a whole new ballgame when it comes to education from Moz. We also believe that the depth of instruction and take-home collateral they provide is more than worth the investment — training packages are custom-priced, and workshops are $79-per-seat early-bird pricing and $99-per-seat regular pricing.

Who are Moz training and workshops for?

Come one, come all! Anyone looking to refine their marketing strategy — specifically as it relates to SEO and getting found online — will find a session with their name on it. While most of our current workshop content is focused towards users with advanced beginner-to-intermediate skill levels, we’ll soon be diving deep and creating content for all levels of expertise. Since our training sessions are fully custom, they can be tailored to match you and your team’s skill level.

Some other folks who might get the most bang for their buck from Moz Academy:

• Marketers looking to refine their skills and dive deeper
• Agencies interested in providing more in-depth audits and insight to clients
• Organizations looking to expand their capabilities
• Companies who’ve brought on new employees who need training
• Intern-training program creators
• Marketers who have seen stagnant or lackluster results and want to supercharge their strategies

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means — and it isn’t meant to be. Why? Because these classes weren’t designed to fill a specific use case: rather, we created them with a specific persona in mind. That persona is someone who wants to constantly push themselves to dive deeper, learn more, and do better marketing.

Why Moz Academy?

All GIFs aside, we’re incredibly excited to share these courses with you because we think they’re going to help marketers from all walks of life supercharge their skills and take their strategies to the next level. Instead of only skimming the surface about big-picture best practices and theoretic applications, group workshop and custom training attendees have a chance to dig deep into the details of SEO and inbound marketing strategy and really get their hands dirty.

Here’s what a couple recent workshop attendees have had to say:

“…the Keyword Planning Worksheet — holy moly that thing is awesome. I’ll definitely be using that over and over again.”

“Presenter was very knowledgable and this could easily have filled many more hours. Great overview to get started with audits using Moz but also third party tools.”

“The technical insights into robots.txt were super helpful — really, the entire workshop was really well done!”

“The presenter did a phenomenal job — everything was super clear, engaging, and easy to apply.”

Learn more about what we cover in each of these sessions or see what’s coming up over at the Moz workshops and training home.

Current topics offered

We currently offer workshops covering four topics:

• Performing website audits
• Keyword research strategy
• Content marketing
• Gaining the competitive edge

Looking for something a little more tailored to your organization’s specific needs and interests? Our custom training curricula have covered topics like:

• Link building
• Video marketing
• Identifying your target audience
• Growing your keyword footprint
• Local search optimization

“That’s great, but what about a class on _____?”

A class on what, you say? Let us know in comments section of this post what sessions you’d like to see! While we currently offer our four flagship workshops, we’re ultimately building the program to encompass a course on everything that goes into a comprehensive traffic generation strategy from start to finish.

If you’re looking for instruction about a particular topic sooner rather than later, drop us a line and let us know a little bit more about what you’re looking for, by when, and for whom — we’d be happy to help provide some custom training if it makes sense for you.

What’s happening to the free videos currently available on Moz Academy?

Nothing, for now. We plan on keeping the free video trainings available for a few more months, but will begin phasing them out later this year. We’ll make sure to provide plenty of advance warning before we do so, though.

Where are we going from here?

Ultimately, we’ll be offering several “tracks” of content that will serve as home to lessons a wide variety of SEO topics (some mentioned above) and at all skill levels. We’d also like to expand just how interactive our courses are (Codeacademy and Treehouse are great inspirations), as well as make it easier for current and future session attendees to connect with each other. We have quite a few other tricks up our sleeves, but you’ll just have to keep an eye on the program to see what we’re up to next!

Interested in learning more about Moz workshops or custom training packages? There’s no time like the present! Get started:

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