Making your website accessible boosts engagement and raise your SEO rankings.

Having a website that works for all users and ranks high in search engines may seem complicated. But improving accessibility and SEO don't have to be at odds! This article will explain how making your site accessible can also make it SEO-friendly.

Accessibility 101

Accessibility means making your website usable for people with disabilities. This includes:

  • Blind users who rely on screen readers to read out text
  • Motor-impaired users who navigate with keyboards only
  • Users with low vision who need to increase text size
  • Users with cognitive disabilities who benefit from simplicity

Accessibility is achieved by adding features like text alternatives for images, ARIA labels, and strong semantics.

SEO 101

SEO stands for "search engine optimization." It means optimizing your site to rank higher in search engines like Google. Good SEO leads to more visitors from organic search traffic.

SEO is about things like:

  • Optimizing page titles and meta descriptions
  • Using keywords appropriately
  • Building quality backlinks
  • Making pages easy to crawl and index

Where Accessibility and SEO Overlap

Many accessibility best practices are also good SEO practices. Let's look at some key areas of overlap:

Semantic HTML

Using proper HTML elements like

,