Originally posted on July 20, 2006 @ 10:12 am
Google is busy as always working on a project dubbed Google Accessible Search.
Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google’s search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts.
Heads up web developers. We need to pay attention to this. Why you ask? Well first lets learn how Google’s Accessible Search works, then you’ll know why.
In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully – pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.
So what does this mean? If you’re not already doing it, you need to start building your websites with accessibility in mind if you want your sites to have even more SEO goodness.
How can we as web developers make our site content more accessible to the blind you might be asking yourself? I recommend you read up on the W3C Web Content Access Guidelines.
The W3C has a lot of useful information on the subject. Broad adherence to these guidelines is one way of ensuring that sites are universally accessible.
Some recommendations that I would personally make would be to add alt tags to all of your site images. Be sure to give them a descriptive name, example “photo of maple tree” and not something like “photo-001”.
If it’s a spacer image or filler image, I usually put an asterisk (*) or a period (.) in the alt tag.
Also, be sure to use title tags on all your links and be descriptive as well with them. You can check the links on my articles for examples of how I do it. Just mouse over a link or two and you’ll see.
Don’t forget to use acronym title tags on acronyms or abbreviations. They do help with accessibility. Happy coding.