The Secret Benefit Of Accessibility Part 2: A Higher Search Engine Ranking
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...