The Correlation Between Search Engine Marketing and Web Accessibility

Think about it. Search engine robots are probably the most disabled Internet users. They can’t see images, don’t understand Flash (this doesn’t mean they understand flash), they will not submit forms,  don’t see text at different sizes and/or colors, and can’t experience the beauty of your highly graphical layout and design.

So how do search engines determine what your page is about? They have to use other means, like referencing what HTML tags you’re using to determine what text is more important than others, what your headings are, links, lists, what is bolded etc… The HTML Specification describes each HTML tag with a special meaning semantically because each HTML tag has it’s own meaning. This is how search engines see what your headings are, and determine the main topic of your web site.

So using heading tags, and table tags, properly will help tell the search engine robot what each element of your web page is. Some of the more important aspects of optimizing your site for the search engine robots are:

• Use descriptive page titles
• Use heading tags appropriately
• Provide alternate content for plugins, mainly flash, but also provide transcripts of audio/video files
• Provide search engine friendly URLs
• Include lots of content
• Use images sparingly, and use alt attributes to describe the image
• Use valid HTML, and clean, structured, markup
• Do not use frames
• Use descriptive META description tags
• Use tables for tabular data only, there really is no excuse for this now, if you are still designing with tables, you’re way out of the loop

So, how does this affect accessibility? Well, if you were to make a checklist of tasks to make your site accessible, would each of these items not be on the list? Really, the job of an SEO is to make your web site accessible to search engines, which indirectly makes it accessible to users of most modern browsers, cell phones and other Internet-enabled devices, as well as users with temporary or permanent major and minor disabilities.

Next time you are reviewing your web site, take a look at each item on the above list, and make sure you can place a check mark beside each item on the list. If you can, then you’re on your way to having an accessible, and search engine-friendly, web site.