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Re: Accessibility and SEO

for

From: Paul J. Adam
Date: Sep 28, 2011 8:18PM

Then we agree, it does help boost your SEO. Google says so in their webmaster documentation. Of course it's not a sure fire hit, you can't expect search engines to point to a site with crappy content if you just make it accessible.

The way you get SEO juice is to actually have compelling content that people are out there searching for and then you also need inbound links from popular sites and recently search engines are moving more towards higher rankings for inbound links from social media sites. You need your site to be linked to from where the people are on the internet. Accessibility comes further down the list of ways to improve your SEO, but it does just that. At least according to Google.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-seo-report-card.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

Paul J. Adam
Accessibility Evangelist
Deque Systems
<EMAIL REMOVED>
www.PaulJAdam.com
@pauljadam on Twitter

On Sep 28, 2011, at 9:21 PM, Ryan E. Benson wrote:

> 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 )
>>>
>>>