Intro to Web Accessibility and SEO: Building Inclusive & Search-Friendly Websites

📘 Chapter 2: SEO Fundamentals — How Search Engines See Your Website

🌍 Introduction: Why SEO Still Matters

No matter how beautiful or accessible your website is, it won’t serve its purpose if users can’t find it. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.

SEO is the practice of optimizing your site so that search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo can:

• Discover your pages
• Understand your content
• Rank it appropriately for search queries

This chapter breaks down the fundamentals of how search engines work, what they look for, and how you can align your site to be both crawlable and competitive.

🔎 1. How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines operate in three key stages:

Each of these stages can be influenced by your site’s technical structure, content quality, and user experience signals.

🕸️ 2. Crawling: Making Sure Bots Can Find Your Pages

A crawler (like Googlebot) explores the web by following links. If your content isn’t linked internally or externally, it might never be found.

✅ Best Practices:

• Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
• Ensure your site is not blocked in robots.txt
• Use internal linking to connect all pages
• Avoid orphan pages (pages not linked anywhere)

🔹 Example: robots.txt

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User-agent: *

Disallow: /private/

Allow: /

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

📦 3. Indexing: What Gets Stored and How

Once your site is crawled, pages are indexed. That means they’re stored in a searchable format. But not everything gets indexed—especially if:

• The page is duplicate or thin content
• There are indexing errors (e.g., noindex tags)
• Page speed or mobile usability is poor
• The page is not linked internally

🔹 Example: noindex Meta Tag

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<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

✅ Tip: Always check your indexed pages in Google Search Console → “Pages” report.

🧠 4. Ranking: How Pages Are Evaluated

Search engines use complex algorithms to determine how relevant your page is for a given query. While exact formulas are secret, key known factors include:

🔠 5. On-Page SEO Elements

Optimizing your content for search starts with the page itself.

🔸 Page Title (<title>)

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<title>10 SEO Tips for Beginners | YourSite</title>

🔸 Meta Description

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<meta name="description" content="Learn 10 easy SEO tips to improve your website ranking and grow your organic traffic.">

🔸 Headings (<h1> to <h6>)

Use only one <h1> per page, followed by logical subheadings.

🔸 URL Structure

• Use hyphens - instead of underscores _
• Keep it readable:
  ✅ /seo-tips-beginners
  ❌ /page?id=38492

📊 Example Table: On-Page SEO Checklist

⚙️ 6. Technical SEO Essentials

Beyond content, search engines care about how well your site is built.

✅ Key Technical Elements:

• Fast loading (Use PageSpeed Insights to test)
• Mobile-first (Responsive design is mandatory)
• HTTPS (Secure your site with SSL)
• Structured Data (Schema markup for rich snippets)
• Canonical URLs (Prevent duplicate content issues)

🔹 Example: Canonical Tag

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<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/original-article" />

🔹 Example: JSON-LD Schema

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<script type="application/ld+json">

{

  "@context": "https://schema.org",

  "@type": "Article",

  "headline": "Intro to SEO for Beginners",

  "author": "Jane Doe"

}

</script>

📱 7. Mobile-First Indexing

Google uses the mobile version of your site as the primary source for indexing and ranking.

✅ Mobile Optimization Checklist:

• Use responsive design (@media queries)
• Avoid fixed-width layouts
• Ensure tap targets are easy to touch
• Keep font sizes readable

Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to verify.

📈 8. Core Web Vitals: Ranking Signal for UX

These are Google's official performance metrics for ranking:

Tools:

• Lighthouse (in Chrome DevTools)
• PageSpeed Insights
• Web Vitals Chrome Extension

🔗 9. Internal Linking & Crawl Depth

Internal linking helps both users and bots navigate your site.

Best Practices:

• Link from high-authority to low-authority pages
• Use descriptive anchor text
• Keep important pages within 3 clicks from the homepage

🔎 10. SEO Audit Tools You Should Use

✅ Recap: SEO in a Nutshell

• SEO is not a trick—it's about aligning your content with searcher intent
• Search engines care about technical health, semantic structure, and user experience
• Accessibility and SEO often overlap: use semantic HTML, descriptive content, and clean markup
• SEO is not “set and forget” — it’s a continuous monitoring and optimization process