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Designing Your Site For User And Crawler Accessibility

T.V. Raman delivers a five-spot of design tips to ensure that your site is accessible to the widest number of users--and engine crawlers. Raman side-steps generalities like "don't use Flash" for slightly more advanced suggestions.

For example, some Webmasters choose to use CSS sprites (files that contain all the images that will show up on a Web page and then display them accordingly to decrease page load times). Raman shows that you can still create alt tags with these sprites--particularly if your images are functioning as links--so that users and engines that have disabled CSS can still access the info.

He also suggests making printer-friendly (which is coincidentally, engine-friendly) content readily available, and not hiding it behind a scripted link. "Creating actual URLs for these printer-friendly versions and linking to them via plain HTML anchors will vastly improve the quality of content that gets crawled," Raman says.

Read the whole story at Google Webmaster Central Blog »

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