WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Accessibility and SEO

for

From: Paul J. Adam
Date: Sep 28, 2011 8:39AM

Some of the suggestions in that article are terrible. Of course you need to have proper use of headings! Google recommends this, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-seo-report-card.html, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html.

ALT text in images makes your site easier to find, whatever you place in the alt text google indexes so if someone searches for text that you have embedded in your images it will show up in their results. I just tested this and it worked.

The authors intent was likely to sell their SEO services. Most of SEO is common sense if you know semantic HTML coding. Write good content, tag it correctly according to web standards and people will find your pages if they search for your content. A lot of this nonsense SEO is voodoo magic.

Just explain to anyone who believes this article word for word that the writer's bottom line is to sell SEO services, not promote web standards or accessibility. The title is what they call linkbait.

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

On Sep 28, 2011, at 4:27 AM, Iza Bartosiewicz wrote:

> 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 )
>