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Re: Accessibility and SEO

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From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Sep 28, 2011 7:21PM

Paul, I have to agree with Allen. While having a fully compliant
website DOES help boost SEO rankings, it is not a sure fire hit that
your rank will boost. From what I read, having an accessible site does
gets you up to the minimum SEO level, you have to go another step. If
you spit out an accessible site 3-5 years ago, you would score 8 or 9
out of 10, nowadays that is like a 5 or so.

--
Ryan E. Benson



On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 2:29 PM, Paul J. Adam < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> I think that accessibility improvements DO actually increase your ranking on search engines if you actually have compelling content worth reading in the first place. Google agrees.
>
> To all extents, totally non-text information is NOT searchable at all, there's no less about it. No text = no indexing.
>
> Paul J. Adam
> Accessibility Evangelist
> Deque Systems
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
> www.PaulJAdam.com
> @pauljadam on Twitter
>
> On Sep 28, 2011, at 2:15 PM, Hoffman, Allen wrote:
>
>> The simple fact is that if people are equating accessibility
>> improvements with increase ranking on search engines may not be true,
>> and this seems to point that out.  they are not the same requirement at
>> the end of the day, so people should not expect higher rankings for
>> accessible content, however, to some extent totally nontext information
>> may be far less searchable than more text intensive data.
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Iza Bartosiewicz [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
>> Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 4:27 AM
>> To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
>> Subject: [WebAIM] Accessibility and SEO
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I've stumbled upon an interesting discussion sparked by the article on
>> 16 SEO Tactics That Will NOT Bring Targeted Google Visitors [1]. It
>> certainly is an eye-opening article, but - like many others that
>> commented on it - I feel that it could potentially damage the argument
>> that accessibility is good for SEO.
>> For example, tactic number 4 concerning header tags states that:
>>
>> "(...) While it's always a good idea to have great headlines on a site
>> that may or may not use a keyword phrase, whether it's wrapped in
>> H-whatever tags is of no consequence to your rankings."
>>
>> Number 5 is about alt text and, although the alt text for linked images
>> gets the tick, alt text for non-linked images 'in most cases' doesn't.
>>
>> I don't believe that the author's intention was to imply that we
>> shouldn't bother with accessibility or semantic markup, so it's
>> unfortunate that it could (and will) be interpreted that way by some
>> folks, because of the way she chose to present her arguments. :-(
>>
>> Hopefully, everyone who reads it will take the time to scan the comments
>> too, and there are many that defend accessibility. This is a clear sign
>> that the message is getting through! :-)
>>
>> cheers
>> Iza
>>
>> [1] http://www.highrankings.com/useless-seo-tactics-303
>>
>>
>> ----
>> Iza Bartosiewicz
>> www.linkedin.com/in/izabartosiewicz
>> twitter.com/mr0wka18 ( http://www.twitter.com/mr0wka18 )
>>
>>