The Secret Benefit Of Accessibility: Part 2 - A Higher Search Rankings
11 Secrets To Leadership In SalesCopyright 2005 Thomas Baskind In his classic book, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill discussed the eleven secrets of leadership. In reading this work, it appears ..... An additional benefit of website accessibility is an improved performance in search engines. The more accessible it is to search engines, the more accurately they can predict what the site's about, and the higher your site will appear in the rankings.
Not all of the accessibility guidelines will help with your search engine rankings, but there are certainly numerous areas of overlap:
1. ALT descriptions assigned to images
Screen readers, used by many visually impaired web users to surf the web, can't understand images. As such, to ensure accessibility an alternative description needs to be assigned to every image and the screen reader will read out this alternative, or ALT, description.
Like screen readers, search engines can't understand images either and won't take any meaning from them. Many search engines can now index ALT text though, so by assigning ALT text search engines will be able to understand all your images.
2. Text displayed through HTML, not images
Text embedded in images appears pixelated, blurry and often impossible to read for users utilising screen magnifiers. From an accessibility point of view this should therefore be avoided.
Search engines equally can't read text embedded in images. Well, you can just give the image some ALT text, right' Unfortunately, there's strong evidence to suggest search engines assign less importance to ALT text than they do to regular text. Why' Spammers. So many webmasters have been stuffing their ALT tags full of keywords and not using them to describe the image. Search engines have cottoned on to this form of spamming (as they eventually do every form of spamming) and have taken appropriate action.
3. Descriptive link text
Beauty Secrets Of The StarsIt comes as no surprise that many of the most beautiful and famous people go to great lengths to maintain their youthful .....
Visually impaired web users can scan web pages by tabbing from link to link and listening to the content of the link text. As such, the link text in an accessible website must always be descriptive of its destination.
Search engines place a lot of importance on link text too. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page. If all the links pointing to a page about widgets say 'click here', search engines can't gain any information about that page without visiting it. If on the other hand, all the links say, 'widgets' then search engines can easily guess what that page is about.
One of the best examples of this in action is for the search term, 'miserable failure'. So many people have linked to George Bush's bio using this phrase as the link text, that now when miserable failure is searched for in Google, George Bush's bio appears top of the search rankings!
4. Website functions with JavaScript disabled
JavaScript is unsupported by about 9% of web users (source: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/November/javas.php), either because they've turned it off (for example to prevent pop-up adverts) or because their browser doesn't support it. Many forms of JavaScript aren't accessible to web users utilising screen readers.
Search engines can't understand JavaScript either and will be unable to index any JavaScript-driven content. Perhaps more importantly, they'll also be unable to follow JavaScript-driven links. You may really like the look of your dropdown menu but search engines won't if they can't access certain pages on your site because there aren't any regular links pointing at them.
5. Alternatives to Flash-based content provided
A 'Hidden' Secret To Affiliate SuccessDid you know that many successful affiliates have a R16;hidden' secret' Guess what it is' It is giving personal recommendations of the product they are re-selling. This ..... Flash, like JavaScript, isn't accessible to many users, including those using screen readers. Equally, search engines can't access Flash so be sure to provide equivalents.
6. Transcripts available for audio
Hearing impaired users obviously require written equivalents for audio content to be able to access it. Search engines too can't access this medium, but transcripts provide them with a large amount of text for them to index.
7. Site map provided
Site maps can be a useful tool for visually impaired users as they provide a straightforward list of links to the main pages on the site, without any of the fluff in between.
Site maps are also great for search engines as search engines can instantly index your entire site when they arrive at the site map it. Next to each link you can also provide a short keyword-rich ......
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