High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization

A visit to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines could convince you that Google rewards high accessibility. This page specifically mentions best practices which will help Google “find, index, and rank your site.”

Design and Content Guidelines:

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.

• Make sure that your title and alt tags are descriptive and accurate. [...]

Technical Guidelines:

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Note that each of Google’s guidelines actually correlates with a W3C Web Content Accessibility Guideline. (Oddly enough, the word “accessibility” does not actually appear in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Perhaps they are afraid of scaring off some webmasters with technical jargon? In any case, it is clear that Google is lobbying for high accessibility.)

SEO: just another feather in accessibility’s cap

The checkpoints I highlighted above are just a few of the many ways that high accessibility will help optimize a website for search engines—many of the other checkpoints in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are helpful to SEO, as well. Of course, to most web designers, the goal of accessibility is (and should be) to make sites accessible to all people, independent of their platform or any disabilities they have. But if accessibility gets a website more traffic from Google, even better!

The good news is that a web designer who follows best practices for accessibility is already practicing solid white hat SEO. Search engines need not scare anyone. When in doubt, design your site to be accessible to blind and deaf users as well as those who view websites via text-only browsers, and SEO will fall into place.

About the Author
Andy Hagans is the founder of Andy Hagans Link Building, an SEO consultancy. When he isn’t building links for clients, you can find him working on his pet projects: Mobile Search Marketing and the Uganda Conflict Action Network.

Contact WingsDove for affordable and effective small business web design and web site optimization.