Website accessibility is crucial regardless of your business’s industry or its size. An accessible website allows you to promote your brand to users around the world. Plus, you can use this accessible site to further distinguish your brand from industry rivals.

Web accessibility and SEO go hand in hand. Using website accessibility best practices is a great way to future-proof your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, too. It helps visitors find your website. In addition, you can enhance your site’s user experience (UX).

There are many things you can do to improve your site’s accessibility for better SEO. This guide will go over four main accessibility considerations that will optimize the signals your website is sending to search engines.

1. Build a sitemap.


A sitemap helps visitors understand the structure behind your website’s content. For example, you can use a sitemap to cater to user intent, providing information about pages, videos, and other files on your website and the relationships between them. The sitemap tells search engines which files you feel are most important and provides information about them.

A search engine can then read your sitemap to crawl your site more efficiently than ever before. Visitors can use your sitemap to quickly and easily access the information they want. Thus, a sitemap can make your website more accessible.

<Warning: Jargon On, but keep reading even if you don’t understand it, just to get a sense of how hard it is. At the end of the jargon, there is hope.> Utilize XML tags to build your sitemap. Data values must be entity escaped, and your sitemap must be UTF-8 encoded. Include an opening <urlset> tag and closing </urlset> tag with your sitemap. You must also specify the protocol standard within each <urlset> tag. For each parent XML tag, include a <url> entry for each URL. Meanwhile, you must include a <loc> child entry with every <url> parent tag. <Jargon Off>

That’s a hard process for anyone but a skilled programmer or for software designed for the purpose. For example, there are WordPress plugins that will build your sitemap for you automatically. Take a look: WordPress Sitemap Plugins.

Humans can’t use an XML sitemap very easily. They need an HTML sitemap. For example, the above link has plugins that create HTML sitemaps besides those that create XML sitemaps. You probably should use both kinds on your site. If your site isn’t built on WordPress, the programmer you hire should be able to build both kinds of sitemaps.

2. Transcribe audio and video.

A video transcript offers a text version of audio content. The transcript provides a site visitor with a text description to help them understand a video or audio clip. It makes site content more accessible to people who are hearing-impaired. 

You can transcribe a video manually or automatically. With manual video transcription, you can hire someone to watch a video and transcribe it word for word. On the other hand, you can use speech recognition technologies, transcription software, and related programs to automatically transcribe videos.

Consider the pros and cons of manual versus automatic video transcription. Manually transcribing a video can take longer than doing so automatically. However, you’ll get the satisfaction of knowing the video is properly transcribed if you or someone you know does it. Though automatic video transcription is faster, it can be costly to implement — and there is a chance that this program will incorrectly transcribe your video so a good editor should review the transcript before you use it.

Website visitors may be dealing with visual impairments. Your site’s color scheme must accommodate these individuals. With the right mix of colors on your website, more users can view your site and enjoy their experience.

Choose an accessible website color scheme that delivers maximum contrast. Ideally, your site’s colors should provide sufficient contrast between the content and background. This ensures site text and non-decorative images are easy to view and understand.

Red-green color blindness is among the most common forms of vision color deficiency, so you should avoid red and green in your site’s color scheme whenever possible.

Use color strategically and consistently. For example, you may use a particular color as an indicator for interactive elements on your website. For instance, you can use a purple asterisk to mark required fields in a website form. Select a different color for other purposes.

4. Make your website content keyboard accessible.

Your website should be accessible without requiring a mouse. To do so, you’ll need to make your web content able to be navigated exclusively with a keyboard. 

Include a visible keyboard focus indicator on your website’s data elements, such as links, buttons, inputs, and any other interactive elements that can be operated with a keyboard. This indicator offers a visual indication of a visitor’s location on your site. If a site item has a keyboard focus, it’s easier for a visitor to navigate to it with their keyboard.

It can be beneficial to use a web kit that lets you alter your site’s keyboard focus and make it more visible for visually-impaired people.

Establish a Tab order for using a keyboard to navigate your site. A visitor should be able to press the Tab button to move from left to right and top to bottom on your website.

Watch for cumulative layout shifts on your site, too. A cumulative layout shift occurs when a page on your site shifts on the screen and causes a visitor to inadvertently select something on the page. Cumulative layout shifts can impact your site’s Google ranking. Even worse, they can make it difficult for visitors to use your site and get the most value out of it, as well.

To guard against cumulative layout shifts, assess your site’s Core Web Vitals<. You can use the Chrome User Experience Report or other tools that support reporting these vitals. These tools can give you insights you can use to optimize your site’s accessibility and UX (“User Experience”).

5. Add alternative (alt) text to images.

Alt text can greatly enhance the UX of your site. In fact, it’s often the first step when optimizing a website for accessibility. Images can be equipped with alt text that allows screen readers to translate what is depicted to those with vision impairments.
Although the primary purpose of alt text is to aid people that are unable to see, there are a few other benefits of adding this extra description to your website images. The description will also show up in the event that an image will not load. Further, alt text allows search engines to “see” images on your website that they otherwise would not be able to crawl.

That doesn’t mean, however, that you should stuff keywords in your alt text. The alt text should be able to be read aloud and describe what is in the image. You should concisely describe the image in under 150 characters and include your target keyword once, if possible. 

Some site builders have the option to add in alt text for every image, but you can also add it into the code manually. For example, the alt text for an image of ripe bananas on a white kitchen countertop, possibly for a blog post about a banana bread recipe, should look something like this:

 <img src=”bananas.png” alt=”ripe bananas for banana bread recipe on white kitchen countertop”>

Paired with aptly named image files, alt text serves both its original purpose of improving accessibility and informing search engines of your site’s content, simultaneously.

6. Use descriptive anchor text and URL slugs.

Similar to providing alt text for images, your website links should be clearly described. Screen reader users can isolate link text. Speech recognition software can follow links spoken by the user.

The URL slug is the trail of characters after the main domain and folder in your website address. While they may serve a minor purpose in search engine rankings, slugs are more useful for enhancing the site’s UX. If you can’t fit the keyword in, that’s okay — as long as the slug is still easily comprehensible. However, the slug should describe the main point of your webpage so if the keyword doesn’t appear, it may be a signal to take a closer look at the usefulness of the content. 

When the URL is copied and pasted into written content without anchor text, a well-crafted slug can add crucial context. Anchor text is the often-blue, underlined text that bolsters a link to an internal or external source. Typically, the anchor text should describe the exact purpose of the linked page. This will naturally use relevant keywords and send signals to search engines, telling them what your page and content are all about.

The surrounding context is also important as Google and other search engines update their ranking algorithms to ensure the quality of content. Don’t use keyword-optimized anchor text that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the sentence or the article as a whole. This will not only confuse search engines, but it will muddle your content for those with accessibility aids.

7. Format headings correctly for page structure.

Instead of a large block of text as an article, many web pages use headers. Headers break web content into digestible sections. This is necessary for accessibility because it gives readers an idea of where they are in a piece and what particular section they need to be focusing on. This is helpful when using tools like screen readers.

Having properly formatted headings not only helps the accessibility of your content, but it also helps your SEO. Search engines crawl your content for relevant text, and headers help them understand the topic. It also adds to the user-friendliness of the website and boosts its reputation, making it more likely to get links back to from credible sites. You should use headings in whatever way feels natural for the subject, utilizing formatting tricks like “Header 1” in word processing tools or the <header> tag in HTML code.

The bottom line on boosting your website’s accessibility for SEO

Do not expect to build an accessible website overnight. Instead, commit time, energy, and resources to learning the ins and outs of website accessibility. 

Determine where, exactly, your site needs to improve so you know the best way to use your available resources. It can help to create a problem-solving flowchart to define your standard process when you address problems that arise on your site, as well as to brainstorm which solutions are most appropriate for you and how to implement them. Not only will this give you a great starting point for maximizing accessibility, but it will also empower you to create a site that simultaneously supports your SEO goals.

You may also opt to invest in a web accessibility training class to create a top-of-the-line site. This type of class teaches you how to build an accessible website and the standards your site should follow, including those laid out by Section 508 and the World Wide Web Consortium.

Remain diligent in your efforts to boost your site’s accessibility for SEO. Look for ways to extract relevant text content from your web pages using a tool like embed.ly. This enables voice readers to read your site aloud without stumbling over irrelevant (noisy) content such as ads, table of contents, header and footer, etc.

Make website accessibility a priority. Get started today, and you can make your website content accessible, SEO-friendly, and user-friendly.

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