Accessibility for all users, even search engines

Accessibility for all users, even search engines

On further reflection, this overlap makes sense. The goal of accessibility is to make web content accessible to as many people as possible, including those who experience that content under technical, physical, or other constraints. It may be useful to think of search engines as users with substantial constraints: they can’t read text in images, can’t interpret JavaScript or applets, and can’t “view” many other kinds of multimedia content. These are the types of problems that accessibility is supposed to solve in the first place.

Walking through a few checkpoints

Now that I’ve discussed the theory of why high accessibility overlaps with effective SEO, I will show how it does so. To do this, I am going to touch upon each Priority 1 checkpoint in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which affects search-engine optimization.

High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization

High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization

Many web designers view search-engine optimization (SEO) as a “dirty trick,” and with good reason: search engine optimizers often pollute search engine results with spam, making it harder to find relevant information when searching. But in fact, there is more than one type of search-engine optimization. In common usage, “black-hat” SEO seeks to achieve high rankings in search engines by any means possible, whereas “white-hat” SEO seeks to code web pages in a way that is friendly to search engines.In Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign, Brandon Olejniczak explains that many web design best practices overlap with those of white-hat SEO. The reason is simple: such practices as separating style from content, minimizing obtrusive JavaScript, and streamlining code allow search engines to more easily spider, index, and rank web pages.Two years later, I am going to take Brandon’s conclusions a step further. I have been a search engine optimizer for several years, but only recently have become infatuated with web accessibility. After reading for weeks and painstakingly editing my personal website to comply with most W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, I have come to a startling revelation: high accessibility overlaps heavily with effective white hat SEO.