WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Web accessibility and SEO

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From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Sep 17, 2004 2:41PM

> I am interested in the impact that web accessibility has on search
> engine optimization.

The more human-accessible a web site is the more machine-accessible it is.
Google-bot will thank you. ;o)

Pay attention to semantic markup as well (which is certainly a part of
accessibility as well.)

> I was wondering if anyone was aware of widely accepted guidelines for SEO

There's a lot out there, but it's fairly simple:

- the cleaner, more semantically rich your content,
the easier it is to index
- good, descriptive TITLES go a long way
- the closer to the top your content is in the source,
the more likely it will be indexed
- write good, pertinent content that others find worthy
enough to link to

And all of these play a role in both SEO and accessibility (and usability).
The only other good idea is to add meta tags for indexing (it won't do much
for your google ranking, but other engines...namely future internal ones can
benefit from it).

-Darrel