How do you optimise a website for accessibility?
Website accessibility and SEO work hand in hand providing a great user experience for all users, including those with visual impairments, hearing problems, and those with other disabilities. How do users with disabilities access your website? Have you ever thought of this? Is your website optimised for accessibility?
When you ensure your website is accessible to everyone and anyone, it benefits your target audience and your business. When you design a website following accessibility guidelines, you make it accessible to a wider audience.
Before we dig into how to optimise your website for accessibility, it's important to understand what it is. Simply put, accessibility is making your website easily accessible to every person that comes into contact with it. It is designed to help all your visitors, including those with disabilities gain access to your website or application.
It involves designing and developing a website and tools to ensure people with disabilities can access them. When your website is accessible, all users can navigate and engage with your website, boosting user experience (UX).
Disabilities go far beyond sight and sound. It is important to understand the disabilities, ensuring you accommodate them when making your website accessible:
Making your website accessible can improve your SEO efforts. Website accessibility and SEO often overlap, improving is important to improving your user experience (UX):
By optimising your page titles, your users understand what the web page is about. Screen readers also rely on page titles to communicate what the page is about to users. Focus on optimising your page titles with your users in mind, rather than focus on search engine crawlers to improve UX and rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Using heading tags are essential to your SEO strategy. Heading tags, <H1> should only be used once, including the primary keyword you have selected. Any additional keywords should be used in <H2> and <H3> tags, helping with page structure. These can include your primary or secondary keywords.
When it comes to website accessibility, you must use only one <H2> tag with your main keyword.
ALT text, or alternative text, is very important when your image doesn't load on the users computer. This can be due to slow bandwidth, causing the image to take longer to download. Rather than showing an empty spot, the ALT text is displayed. ALT text mus be relevant and accurate to the image without too many keywords, rather focus on your main keyword.
ALT text is also important to website accessibility and can be read aloud by screen readers. In addition to website accessibility, these texts help you improve traffic and click-through rates from image searches.
Anchor text is more than simply navigating to another page, when used correctly it is a valuable SEO strategy, along with boosting website accessibility. It gives you the opportunity to describe the content of the page, along with your targeted keywords.
Anchor text is used by screen readers, informing users that they found a link on the page. The user can decide if the anchor text is relevant and choose to move to the next page.
When you pay attention to your website accessibility, you ensure all potential customers, including those with disabilities, have a great experience when using your website. You can implement the above best practices, making it easier for everyone to access and make use of your website, helping to drive traffic to your website, and increasing your chances of improving conversions.
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