The process of testing your website to ensure it is fully accessible to all users is a lot of work. In fact, you might be tempted to use a few automated accessibility testing tools and call it a day. While there are quite a few fantastic automated accessibility testing tools that can catch issues, they won’t catch absolutely everything you need to find. They do an excellent job at catching issues that are programmatic, but they’re not an end-all-be-all solution. Your users are ultimately human beings, which means they’ll experience any given website differently than a computer will. Therefore, part of your routine when it comes to accessibility testing needs to involve real people who know what they’re looking for.

When you’re trying to optimize your website for the search engines, you might feel overwhelmed at the amount of advice there is out there regarding on-page and off-page SEO. Chances are, you already have a few keywords in mind that you want your website to rank for, so what needs to be done to make sure you show up on the first page of the search results? Fortunately, ranking for the keywords you have in mind is easier than you might think. It takes a bit of hard work and effort, but once you understand the basics, you’ll be able to ensure greater search visibility.

Let’s start with exactly what on-page SEO is. Essentially, on-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing individual web pages with the goal of ensuring those web pages rank higher in search engines. While off-page SEO refers to activities and/or things you do outside of your website, such as links and other external signals, on-page SEO refers to activities and/or things you do inside your website, such as changing the content or HTML code of a page.

Nowadays, businesses are much more aware of the vital role SEO plays in helping them be found online. However, a number of factors can define how SEO-friendly any given website will be for web crawlers, and for a lot of people, all of these factors can get confusing and overwhelming. In an effort to break things down, we’ll look at two important factors that are often overlooked: crawlability and indexability. So what is crawlability? What about indexability? Let’s start by reviewing how search engines actually discover pages on the web, in order to gain a better understanding of these two terms. 

The internet enables us to access information, financial institutions, stores, education, and much more in the form of audio, text, video, and other formats. It’s an incredibly useful tool that many of us rely on in our day-to-day lives, whether we’re using it personally or professionally. We depend on the Internet to give us virtually infinite amounts of data — allowing us to make decisions, collaborate together, and stay in touch with those who are important to us. In a sense, the Internet acts as a portal to all of the knowledge we, as a collective society, have. But often, the Internet remains restricted or dependent on assistive technologies for persons with disabilities to take advantage of it. This is why it’s essential for businesses to ensure web accessibility for everyone, including those with disabilities. 

Search engine optimization is more important than ever before. Why? Because we live in the digital age where every business has a plethora of competition on the web. Searchers can find a huge range of results when they’re looking for any given product or service. That’s why it’s vital to make sure you’re standing out and ranking high for keywords relating to your products and/or services. When you’re following common best practices for search engine optimization, you’re able to boost your search engine rankings while also achieving various benefits in terms of usability. For instance, your website will load quicker, be easier to navigate, and ultimately, convert more prospects into customers. 

So what kind of SEO methods are you using? No, we’re not talking about on-page or off-page, we’re talking about black hat SEO vs. white hat SEO. If you’re not familiar with the terms, you might be using techniques that won’t necessarily set you up for great results in the future. Knowing the difference between black hat SEO and white hat SEO is essential to ensure you’re meeting your long-term goals when it comes to ranking on the search engines. Let’s take a look at the meaning of each term.