Improving search engine optimization with accessibility

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Search engines are actually screen readers if we simplify them so accessibility is extremely important for search engine optimization as well.

All web authors probably want that their content is found by search engines, right?

And all of their accessibility efforts is directed toward wide spectrum of different user needs.

So it should be only logical that when taking care of accessibility we are also getting some positive impacts on search engine optimization. Let’s take a look where do SEO and A11y overlap.

Alternative texts on graphical elements are extremely important for screen-readers and search engine is the most popular screen-reader of them all

When we think of screen-reader parsing our webpage it should be obvious that alternative text is one of the most important contents we must provide beside our normal text content.

As computer vision and machine learning improve their optical character and object recognition algorithms we can surely conclude that search engines can get some basic information from our graphics automatically. But let’s be honest – in the same way that authors can not expect computer software generated alternative texts to be perfect – we can not expect that from search engines as well.

So providing alternative text that is to the point, not too long, not too short, making sense to human reader when taking into account the context around it is our best bet for search engine optimization too.

Some examples of alternative text important to search engines;

  • image alternative text
  • video transcripts
  • infographics described-by text
  • podcast transcripts
  • scalable vector graphics title and described-by text
  • HTML canvas graphics title and described-by text

Semantic structure will benefit search engines too

When testing our web pages with screen-readers we got to see that all semantic elements of the page, from landmarks to title structure can be most valuable for the screen-reader user – so that we can navigate and even do some abstract content layout scanning with the help of page structure alone.

But we can also conclude that semantics is extremely important for search engine crawlers and parsers too. They can find a lot of structure context and define what is the navigation part to pass to next crawling thread, what is the most important content in the main part of the site, where are the meta-data items and even what is to be potentially dropped – an aside advertisement for example.

Some examples of semantics that is important for screen-readers and search engines;

  • navigation landmarks
  • title and subtitle structure
  • main, section, article structure
  • aside and complementary
  • footer and meta

Content itself

If text is understandable and perceivable to humans then there is a chance it will be shared between them and we all know that content is king, but if it is also shared a lot it improves our search engine rankings too. So forget about stuffing your content with keywords, synonyms and other artificial decorations that were in past needed to out-rank your competition and think for the good of the user. Search engines are better and better in distinguishing content that is made for users and content that is stuffed with ballast and consequently not being read by the users at all.

There are also other factors, especially in the Single Page Application world

Let’s not forget that in these days static rendered pages are still important for the search engines. They are improving parsing of JavaScript generated websites on a daily basis, but it is still preferable to serve back-end generated content for the search engines.

And it totally makes sense – as they must use a lot more resources to crawl and parse all the dynamic content. And if we think of billions of pages they need to parse every microsecond counts.

But there is more than just static versus dynamic. Dynamic widgets and accordions and modals etc. must be implemented with both screen-reader and search engine in mind. So sometimes developers need to invest more time and test it with combinations.

And do not forget the dynamic routing of the single page applications that must also be accessible and crawlable at the same time. There are some patterns that are supported and some that are not working well.

So in these dynamic days we need additional developing and testing to make it work for a screen-reader and maybe even for a web-crawler that search engines use (and do not forget that not all are the same, so we actually need to think & test of and for combinations and variations).

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

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