Section 508 & SEO, Good For Each Other
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and volume of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural algorithms. Because effective SEO may require changes to HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site design, menus, content and forms that are easy to optimize. ”Spamdexing” or the use of “link farms” to draw traffic to a web site from search engines degrade the relevence of search results and the user experience.
In many ways designing a web site for SEO improves the user experience as well as makes the web site more readable for visually impaired users who use screen readers. Think about what search engines do to index a page and what a screen reader for the visually impaired do to read a screen. Both the search engine and screen reader depend upon text to do their jobs.
- Google and Jaws use alt tags and HTML tags to read pages for SEO and speech to text for the visually impaired respectively.
- The same elements that a screen reader does not pick up are also ignored by search engine spiders, namely graphical images.
- Clear and well written text is easiest for a user of a screen reader to understand and it also makes for better natural language rankings in a search engine. Search engines use tools to analyze the language in a paragraph of text for ranking purposes. Better written text will naturally rank better in a search and will be more understandable to a visually impaired listener.
Want to improve your SEO? Make your sie Section 508 compliant.