seo and accessibility

When it comes to designing a new website, most of us are guilty of concentrating on the aesthetics – in an image oriented society it’s just second nature. But beauty is only skin deep, and no matter how sexy your site looks, if it isn’t accessible, it isn’t going to be worth the paper the domain name registration is printed on.

When you consider that the UK’s disabled population has a collective spending power of £50 billion, it seems incredible that millions of websites fail to provide some form of disability access. And not only do inaccessible websites exclude disabled people; 67% of friends and family would then consider not using that business themselves.

The more accessible you make a website, the more likely it is to be used, pure and simple. It’s lucky therefore that SEO and accessibility go hand in hand. Many SEO techniques employed to make sure that pages rank well also provide disabled people with the assistance necessary to make navigating and using a website easier.

Some techniques go a long way towards making a site accessible and more likely to rank well;

• providing text alternatives for images
• providing textual content where visual content is used
• using explanatory text to describe the target of a link

Get in touch to find out more about accessibility and SEO.