Over the past couple of weeks, we are Creare have realised the importance of having a disabled friendly website. We wanted all of our company sites and customers sites to be accessible to all types of users.

So where do you start?

The first thing we thought of was the size of the text, we currently have size 12px, but this can easily be increased by using your command button plus the + & - on your keyboard.

PC - ctrl + or ctrl -

MAC - cmd + or cmd -

We then thought for the visually impaired audio would be an excellent idea, we used www.talkr.com to integrate an automated audio podcast into our news post, which is click-able at the bottom of this post.

We were so happy with this that we found a way of integrating a similar method onto the home page, search engine optimisation page and other services pages. This means from anywhere on the Creare Communications site site you can listen to the content via audio.

Less computer Literate.

It is good practice to ensure that the usability of your site is well designed, we made sure that our site has clearly labeled navigations, large heading and obvious ways of navigating throughout the site. Obvious but important techniques

If you would like to contact Creare regarding disabled friendly websites or search engine friendly websites please call one of the numbers on the top banner.

Why should disabled people be unable to use the internet?

As one of the best SEO companies in the country, we know how important it is not only make our sites as optimised as possible, but also to make them as disability-friendly as we can.

UK businesses with a website have been legally obliged to make them accessible for disabled users since 1999. Currently we have optimised our site for deaf users and also the visually impaired, with a little mp3 feature called ‘Listen’ that allows a user to listen to the pages as well as reading. But what else can we do?

Businesses with accessible websites can tap into the estimated £80bn spent by people with disabilities, which leaves us with a few questions and possibilities to consider when it comes to optimising a site. Is there a standard programme to use for text sizing, for example? There is a lot to consider when optimizing a site for disabled users and at Creare we believe we are on the right track.

Making a website disability-friendly is becoming a bigger issue for more and more companies these days. There are a lot of tricks to do with web design, but what about search engine optimisation (SEO)?

Links are a huge part of SEO- they can optimise websites by linking them to other industry related sites. But how can links make a website disability-friendly as well as SEO friendly?

Imagine you have a pie chart or some sort of graph on your site that gives vital information about your company. Graphs and so on can be confusing for partially-sighted people, especially with the detail and colours. A good idea to solve this problem would be putting a link underneath the image that directs the user towards another page where the information in the pie chart is given in a simple text format only. It makes it easier for the user to read and can also help your SEO; make the page of text keyword rich, and your site is also automatically optimised.

We at the Creare Group always strive to make our websites as user friendly as possible.  This includes making our sites as disabled friendly as possible.  Google works hard to ensure that sites that are designed for a disabled visitor receives SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) benefits (if the features are implemented properly).
For example you will see on the Home Page for this site that we have a feature called Listen.  This feature helps people who have a visual impairment to listen to the site.  This feature has bene added in a way that improves the optimisation of our site so that it performs better within Google (and the other search engines).  We at Creare think it is an excellent idea to reward sites that cater for the disabled user.

As an SEO company we try and get as much traffic to our customers sites as possible, this means then that we have various way of generating this traffic i.e. organic search engine optimisation, PPC, Directories, Affiliates and Google’s Local Business Center.

Local Business Center allows you to add your customer for a specific industry and specific area. such as a customer of ours called Hereford Tyres.

When you type in ‘Tyres Hereford’ into Google.co.uk you get this result:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=tyres+hereford&btnG=Search&meta=

Not only to they appear in the organic listings, they also appear in the Google maps section at the top. This is excellent for regional SEO campaigns and automatically gives a great listing.

It is important that your chosen SEO company understands your best interests and that it understands every opportunity to improve traffic to your site.