SEO 'should incorporate accessibility'

4th September 2008

It is a good idea for marketers to consider website accessibility when undertaking search engine optimisation (SEO), according to one expert.

Ann Smarty of Search Engine Journal highlighted some of the ways in which SEO and accessibility can be combined, including using alt tags - which are crawled by search engines - to make image content accessible to visually impaired users.

Displaying written transcripts for audio and video content can also help to increase the accessibility of such files for disabled web users, as well as enable search engine crawlers to better understand the website's content.

Link anchor text should also be understandable out of context - this can be achieved by making such text as descriptive as possible, rather than using phrases such as 'click here', Ms Smarty advised.

According to E-consultancy, the UK market for accessibility and usability services will grow by 20 per cent this year.