For those who rely on assistive technologies, such as screen readers, and who may be visually impaired, or have difficulties with their motor, hearing or cognitive faculties, website accessibility is an essential initiative.
Enabling anyone with a disability to access the web and use the information they find without any limitations, website accessibility should be at the forefront of any modern web design strategy, and working with a web development company in Surrey will guarantee this.
What’s the relationship between web accessibility and SEO?
When your chosen web development company starts putting the following best practices for digital accessibility into place, this will also enhance the performance of any SEO strategies they may have running:
Alt tags to describe images
For anyone relying on assistive technology, images are often a barrier to their overall online experience. Fortunately, using image alt text or alt tags to give a description of an image can help users understand the content, and guide search engines towards knowing what the image is about.
In so far as search engines and assistive technologies are concerned, image SEO is vital for helping them understand what’s on a web page.
Transcripts for video and audio
For those with a hearing impairment, transcripts are crucial for video and audio content. Since search engines aren’t able to read audio content or video files, and must instead crawl the transcript linked to it, providing transcriptions makes your content accessible to a much broader audience using technology to help them read screens. They also provide additional context for search engines when ranking pages.
Headings and subheadings
Helping to break up chunks of content and make it accessible to anyone with a cognitive impairment, headings and sub headings can also be optimized with meta titles to help a page perform better in SEO rankings.
Descriptive link or anchor text
Describing the content that it links back to, link text or anchor text helps the visually impaired better understand any links provided on a web page. Additionally, anchor text aids search engines in understanding linked content’s relevance. To improve both SEO and accessibility, accurate descriptive text should always be used.
Keyboard navigation
For anyone with motor impairments, being able to navigate a website without having to use a mouse, can make their experience far easier and more fulfilling. Hence, keyboard navigation is an important aspect of accessibility, and following recommended accessibility guidelines also aids search engines reliant on semantic HTML, in understanding how your website is structured. This in turn, can help boost your search rankings.
Color contrast
If a visually impaired user is unable to read the content on your website due to poor color contrasts between the text and the background, not only will they have a disheartening experience visiting your site, but you might miss out on a potential sale. Check the minimum guidelines outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG) for color contrasts, to make sure you’re meeting best practices for both accessibility and SEO.
Accessibility and SEO in Surrey go hand in hand, and although making your website usable for anyone with a disability should of course be your priority, it’s undeniably a happy bonus that it happens to enhance SEO at the same time.
