1. SEO and Accessibility How they work together
Christine Laikind – Founder, SCS Digital Marketing
Advocacy Speaker on Web Accessibility |

2. Web Accessibility What does it mean
In short: it is making the website inclusive and accessible to everyone – including to those who have disabilities.

3. Why It is Important
25% of adults* in the US have some sort of disability – demographic that you are ignoring and leaving money or opportunities behind.
ADA lawsuits on the rise. Small businesses are affected. It is not just large companies that are getting sued.
*301 million people are adults in USA. Estimated 52 million adults have some sort of disability.

4. Inclusion
It is the right thing to do. Web Accessibility means equal access for everyone – including those who have disability.

5. Address the myths
It cost too much (to do the ”stuff” to make web accessible)
There’s really no benefit or ROI (to make web accessible)
It will interfere with functionality and design (of my website to make it web accessible)

6. Reality
There is really no extra cost – it needs to become part of the design process, not an after thought.
There is a benefit and ROI= increased rankings, new demographics, additional revenue from an optimized site.
An optimized site is actually a well designed website with good user experience.

7. FACT: websites that take web accessibility seriously consistently rank higher than their competition on Google and YouTube.
Why? Because Search engine optimization (SEO) best practices and following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) actually overlap!

8. Web Accessibility
To understand Web Accessibility – first, understand how the web is being used by those who have a disability:
Assistive Devices
Keyboard
Screen Readers
Captioning or Transcripts
And lastly – how you design the website also has an effect on web accessibility.

9. Web Accessibility
Web accessibility can help improve your SEO by keeping your website’s interface cleaner, easier to navigate, and improving the bounce rate among other benefits.

10. Web Accessibility and Your Market
Web Accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the web.
How they “experience” it may be different, but they still have the right to access or experience the “content” you are delivering.

11. Every Day People Three types of disabilities:
Permanent: blind, deaf, and so on
Episodic: example of this would be epilepsy, mental illness, migraines, pstd
Conditional or Situational: example can be slow internet connection or broken leg or arm, dyslexic, color blindness

12. CONTENT is KING in both accessibility and SEO.
SEO and UX equals success, right? Web Accessibility and UX equals SEO and that equals Success.

13. How Does Web Accessibility Improve SEO?
Let’s count the ways:
SEO BEST PRACTICES and WEB ACCESSIBILITY that are in close alignment
Mobile Friendly
Strong Site Architecture
Using Proper Alternative Text for Images
Easy to Use Navigation (clear and consistent)
Providing Descriptive Link Text
Ensuring Page Titles are descriptive yet succinct
Providing transcripts and captions for video and audio
Providing useful links to relevant and related resources
How Does Web Accessibility Improve SEO?

14. SEO Best Practices: Users Come First
Quality of Content:
make sure the content focuses on visitor needs,
Don’t worry too much about keywords here
Long form (minimum of 500 words, 1900 words)
If you use video, which is popular, make sure it is captioned and transcribed. (Closed Captions are text files that are searchable and increase engagement)

15. SEO Best Practices: Users come first
Strong Site Architecture
Means Flat Architecture
Users and crawlers can reach any page on website in 4 clicks or less
Make your hierarchy logical.
Each main category should be unique and distinct
Subcategory relate to the main category
Keep the number of main category between two and seven
Balance the subcategories within each category, keep it even

16. SEO Best Practices: Users Come First
User Experience
Easy Navigable Website:
Relevant Internal Linking
Related Content
Use Proper Heading – they create logical hierarchy, organize thoughts.
Site Speed is Quick – website download fairly quickly
Calls to Action – it should clearly state what the visitor should get when they click. While each page may have one primary goal, not every visitor will be ready to convert, provide a secondary goal to keep the visitor engaged.

17. SEO Best Practices: Users Come First
User Experience
Use Proper Heading – they create logical hierarchy, organize thoughts.
If possible, Use only one H1 per page, per good design and accessibility practices
Other headers, such as h2-h6 should be used to organize the rest of your webpage so site visitors can easily scan content and understand each session is about.
Screen Readers will be able to accurately portray the website if done this way H1 H2 H3

18. SEO Best Practices: Users Come First
Relevant Internal Links
Internal Links is one that points to another page on the same website.
Use descriptive keywords in anchor text that gives a sense of topic or keywords the course page is trying to target.
SEO best practice: it is useful for establishing site architecture and spreading link equity.
Best Practices:
Content Links- make sure it is relevant, not broken, one click away
Call to Action Links – keep it above the fold. Present on each page

19. SEO Best Practices: Users Come First
Descriptive Link
Click here is not descriptive link, neither is: Read more
SEO Friendly is:
Succinct
Relevant to the linked to page
Low Keyword density
Not generic
Best Practices:
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20. SEO Best Practices: Mobile Friendly
Easy to Use Navigation
Buttons and Links
Size (screen and font size)
Cross Device Compatibility (smart phone, tablets, desktop)
mobile-website-design-examples

21. SEO Best Pratices: Mobile Friendly
Shutterfly
Evernote
Zappos

22. SEO Best Practices: Alt-Tags
Good on-page SEO practices
Use Alt-tags for all of your images – improves your accessibility and USER EXPERIENCE
Alt tags on all image will also provide greater relevance to search engines
It is a lazy and bad habit to be uploading images like: “img001.jpg.”

23. SEO Best Practices: Alt-Tags
Why It’s Important?
Accessibility
Alt text is a tenet of accessible web design. Its original (and still primary) purpose is to describe images to visitors who are unable to see them. This includes screen readers and browsers that block images, but it also includes users who are sight- impaired or otherwise unable to visually identify an image.

24. SEO Best Practices: Alt-Tags
Why It’s Important?
Image SEO
alt text offers you another opportunity to include your target keyword. With on-page keyword usage still pulling weight as a search engine ranking factor, it's in your best interest to create alt text that both describes the image and, if possible, includes a keyword or keyword phrase you're targeting

25. Good Alt-tags: Keep Users In Mind
Describe the image as specifically as possible. Alt text is, first and foremost, designed to provide text explanations of images for users who are unable to see them.
Keep it (relatively) short. The most popular screen readers cut off alt text at around 125 characters.
Use your keywords. Alt text provides you another opportunity to include your target keyword on a page, and thus another opportunity to signal to search engines that your page is highly relevant to a particular search query. While your first priority should be describing and providing context to the image, if it makes sense to do so, include your keyword in the alt text of at least one image on the page.

26. Good Alt-tags

28. Video and Audio Files Closed Captions and Transcripts
Provide them for your videos and podcasts
Text transcript will make it easier for Google and other search engines to index the content
It will help your Google ranking
Not only benefits the deaf, think about temporary or situational “disability”

29. SEO Best Practices How Transcripts Help Boost SEO
Google Crawlers can’t hear audio. Transcripts TELL them what your podcast is about so they (crawlers) can index and rank accordingly.
Examples:

30. Quick Intro – Christine Laikind
Digital Marketing Agency for Speakers, Coaches and Trainers
Advocacy Speaker on Web Accessibility
Born deaf due to genetic defect
Do know ASL, but don’t use it
I depend on lip reading to understand others and use various technology to conduct business or do what everyone else does.

31. Copy of this presentation
digitalmarketing.com/events/
Download SEO Best Practices Checklist (PDF) on the website