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Re: Accessibility and SEO

for

From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Sep 28, 2011 12:15PM

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 )