Accessibility Enhances SEO

What's necessary for some, is good for all. Creating accessible web sites does not only help people with disabilities, but also enhances a site's search engine optimization techniques. This article will provide examples on how accessible solutions can enhance SEO.

Images

Images do not enhance a web site's ranking in the search engines, because they do not contain any textual information. Once we attach descriptions to images and these are relevant to the image and the content of the page, search engines will have more information to rank the page. At the same time, we ensure that people who cannot see or understand the image will be able to make use of it. The more descriptive the alternative text is, the better the page will rank among related content and the more visually impaired people will understand it.

Headings

Search engines categorize content by examining the content of headings 1-6. Similar to images, when these heading descriptions are strongly related to the page content and help the user navigate the site, it will also be helpful for search engines to categorize content. Likewise, visually impaired people will be able to browse the content more effectively. People with low vision will be able to distinguish titles of parts and chapters more easily, and screen reader users will be able to browse the list of headings as well.

Links

Links should always tell a story. Just be reading the links on a page, visitors should be able to figure out what the content of the page is. However, often times links throughout a whole page contain nothing else but "click here". When a page has a link to your site, ranking in search engines will be determined by the text of the link. If it only says "click here", it won't be any different from the millions of others out there. But if the description of the link is the name of your company, you have two references at a time, one to your page, and one related to the name of the company. As an added bonus, people with disabilities will be able to understand the content of your page faster just by quickly browsing through the links.

Proper markup

Always validate your HTML and CSS code. When it comes to search engines, proper markup will ensure that your text will be categorized where it belongs. When you use larger fonts or improper heading tags for titles and subtitles of your page, the wording you put so much thought into will not enhance your page's ranking, because search engines are looking for proper headings. Once you use the tags properly, aside from ranking higher, assistive technology softwares will be able to make use of this information as well. Screen readers, for example, can list the headings on a page, giving people an idea about the main points and a quick way to jump there. This is only one example, but you always want to make sure that search engines find what you want them to find.

Text Language

Always identify the language of the text in the HTML code. Very often you can find search engines and search features which allow you to search by language. When you search for English only for example, first those pages will come up in which English is specified, and if the engine assumes that most pages where language is unspecified are in English, your page will come up after them. People who use screen readers often have an option to have a page read aloud to them in the language the page was written. If you specify the language of the page, or the language of a block of text, screen readers will automatically switch to this language, and it won't happen that Spanish text will be read with an English accent.