According to the American Foundation For The Blind , there are over 21 million adults in the United States alone who experience vision loss. This does not include persons who are color blind or who do not report the change in their eye sight. Using magnification software or screen reading software, many visually impaired persons use the internet today. One big concern expressed by these internet users is web site accessibility, that is, how well the site uses text to explain its content. Amazingly, accessibility is improving drastically, thanks to SEO, search engine optimization. This article explains some steps you can take to improve the search engine optimization on your site, as well as accessibility, all at the same time.
Headings, landmarks, and Alt Tags
When designing a site, many developers choose to add links to skip to navigation or content. Adding aria landmarks is a way to do this without impacting the appearance of your site. Search engines use this information to determine what part of your site is most important to search, and screen reader users can easily move between these landmarks.
Heading tags are also a powerful way to divide up content. Using tags for such things as article titles and major sections make the page more understandable for readers, easier to navigate for screen reader users, and indicates the relevance of each section to search engines. Alt tags are a way of labeling images without the text of that label being visible to viewers. Here’s an example: <img src="myfile.jpg" alt="picture of a happy search engine"> The alt tag is readable by search engines, unlike pictures, and is readable by screen readers. This is especially useful for graphical links, because search engines use this information to better understand why the link is there, and what it links to.
Forms And CAPTCHAs
HTML 5 offers a new way of writing forms. Part of this new method is the label. Using the label to identify text fields and other elements is an excellent way to have a clear form layout, let search engines know more about your page, and keep screen reader users informed about what information is required. CAPTCHAs are commonly used to prevent spam from appearing. There are much better ways to accomplish this goal, including solving a simple math problem. This solution offers a simple math problem to solve. Search engines find a sentence which they understand instead of a graphic they don’t. This is best for SEO. If traditional CAPTCHAs are required, using services like reCAPTCHA , which offer visual and audible challenges, are an excellent alternative.
Conclusion
Increasing the customer base is the goal of any business. SEO is one of the biggest aids to high traffic. As this article has shown,there are things that can be done to improve SEO dramatically. In the process, site accessibility is also enhanced, leading to even more groat. Really, there is no reason not to implement a11y on any site. Another barrier to high traffic is slow servers. If you’re thinking about amping up your servers with more or faster ram, or a faster processor, SMS Assembly buys and sells processors and ram.
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