SEO vs Accessibility Video - Search Engine Optimisation Tutorial
Script:
Nick – Welcome to our SEO Video Blog. James is still on holiday so Amelia is with us again. We’re going to talk about SEO V Web Accessibility. Why is web accessibility important, Amelia?
Amelia – Because a well designed website should perform the same functions for all of it’s users. You should think about accessibility at the beginning of the design process.
Nick – Yes, So that you can plan ahead. A lot of accessible features are also SEO friendly, because Search Engine Spiders work in a similar way to a lot of accessibility software, screen readers for example.
Amelia – Yes, the more accessible your site is for it’s human visitors the more accessible it is for the search engine spiders too. Search engine spiders like sites that they can crawl easily, so it makes sense to try and help them as much as possible. By following some simple accessibility guidelines you can also make your site easier for people with disabilities to use your website.
Nick – So, what are these accessibility guidelines, Amelia?
Amelia – Well the most obvious one to start with is ALT tags. Most web designers and SEOs have heard of ALT tags, and probably used them even if only to pass W3C compliance… But the reason it is really important to use them is the same reason that W3C made it part of the validation process in the first place, simply that a blind or visually impaired person cannot see images. But they can hear a description of the image. So, ALT tags should be descriptive of the image they are attached to.
Nick - How does this affect SEO? Well, search engine spiders can’t see images either, so they look for ALT tags to understand the visual content on the page. If you can get a keyword in there, then so much the better, but we would never recommend stuffing ALT tags with keywords.
Amelia – Yes, another thing that is good for both SEO and Accessibility is the use of descriptive anchor text. Anchor text should describe the page that it links to. A blind web user will tab from page to page, listening to the link text as they go. If the text is descriptive then they have a better understanding of the page they are about to visit, and can decide whether they want to or not.
Nick - Search engines are similar, they like descriptive anchor text because it helps them to understand what the page is about. It is also one of the ways that Google determine PageRank, so is very important for SEO. Anchor text should also be varied, because it is unnatural for a page to be just about one thing.
Amelia – The next thing you should have is a sitemap. Sitemaps are very useful for all users, but especially useful for disabled users. Again, disabled and blind users will tab through a sitemap to navigate their way around a site quickly and easily.
Nick – Sitemaps are great for SEO because search engines can crawl a site with a sitemap much more easily because all the links to all the pages are there. It makes their job easier and they will reward you for it. It is also good to provide an xml sitemap for search engines.
Amelia- you should also provide useful and descriptive page titles. These help blind users know what a page is about before they decide whether to listen to the rest of it. Remember that blind people do not have the privilege of scan reading a page; they must listen to it, word for word. It’s true that a blind user will set their screen reader at speeds that many sighted people would find difficult to understand but even so, page titles should be descriptive of the content represented on the page.
Nick – Page titles are on of the most important on-page optimisation tools, they are the first things a search engine sees, and can help the search engines determine what the page is about. By making sure your page titles include your keywords you can help your optimisation.
Amelia – Use headings and subheadings to break up your text. This is helpful for everyone, but especially for people who can’t see the page. Blind users can tab between headings, just like they do with links. This can help them decide whether to listen to the paragraph or not.
Nick – Headings are incredibly important for SEO. This is because search engines put more importance on text within headings. Headings can make a lot of difference to SEO.
Amelia – Finally, use CSS for layouts and not tables. Tables are incredibly difficult for screen readers to interpret, because they don’t see the table as a whole but cell by cell. CSS is great for accessibility as the ratio of code to content is smaller on pages where an external file deals with the look of the site.
Nick – This is also useful for Search engines because they find the html code easier to read if it is separated from the styles. The code is generally cleaner, better and sites load faster with CSS. CSS is also great if you want to make a style change to a website as you only have to change one file as oppose the every single one on the site, and for large sites this is very daunting.
Amelia – So you can see that by keeping in mind certain aspects of accessibility you can improve your SEO. SEO should never be a reason to ignore accessibility. SEO is all about creating great web pages that users will want to find in the search engines. By applying accessibility features to your site you are also helping the search engines do their job too.
Nick – Thanks for watching, if you want to know more about accessibility guidelines that can help with SEO then visit : crearecommunications.co.uk/web-accessibility.php. If you have any comments you’d like to share then please add them to the blog post at www.crearecommunications.co.uk/news.
