Other Elements
Every page needs the following elements:
- Title: a title for the current page. Try to place your keywords in the first ten characters or so as these are the most important.
- Description: a brief description of the current page and what it contains. Again, try to get your keywords as close to the beginning as possible but use proper sentence structure.
- Keywords: the keywords that should be used for this specific page. Place the most important ones at the beginning.
In addition to these, some elements which you may use in a page will require titles or alternative descriptions for when a user rolls their mouse over them or when graphics are turned off or unavailable.
- Title: links should be assigned a brief description which informs the user where the link leads. This is displayed on mousing over the link or is read aloud by screen readers. In the case of main navigational elements the title or description for the pages they lead to could be used.
- Alt: every image on a page requires alternative descriptive text in the event that graphics are turned off, unavailable or that the user has a vision impairment that renders them irrelevant. Alt text should not describe the picture, necessarily, but be an alternative way of outline the point the picture makes. For example, the alt text for a company logo should be the company name while the alt text for a graph showing sales data should be something like "sales data for the past twelve months demonstrates the rise in book sales".
- Summary: if you present any data in a table you should provide a brief description for what the data concerns. For example, if you had a bus timetable on a page your description should be something like “Table of bus times for the Leicester 44 route, Monday to Friday”.