WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Accessibility and SEO

for

From: Paul J. Adam
Date: Sep 28, 2011 12:30PM


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 )
>
>