There are many things to think about when it comes to creating a website that is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). One of the most important but often overlooked aspects is SEO, which plugins like accessiBe WordPress can help address. Here are seven ways to improve your SEO rankings for ADA-compliant websites.
1. Be Mobile Friendly
One of the most important things to consider regarding ADA compliance is that your website’s design must be accessible through mobile devices. This means that all images have an alternate tag, and text must not exceed a certain size. By making sure your website is mobile-friendly, you’ll already increase your chances of a good search engine ranking.
2. Use Semantic Markup and Text Descriptions
While semantic markup and text descriptions won’t directly improve your SEO rankings, they will help Google’s algorithms decipher what the content on your page means. This is especially important for images because it will help Google determine whether or not to include them in the search result pages. It’s also important for complex graphs and other visuals, especially if you have an infographic on your site.
3. Use a 301 Redirect If You Change Domains
No matter what you do with your website, there is a good chance that, at some point, you’ll have to change domains. This is especially true if you make ADA-compliant changes after moving or redesigning your website. The last thing you want is for all of the old links out there pointing at your site to stop working, which can affect your SEO rankings. To ensure smooth sailing when it comes to SEO, use a 301 redirect so that all of your rankings are preserved.
4. Avoid Flash and JavaScript
While they may look nice, flash elements and JavaScript tend to be invisible to search engines, which means that Google won’t crawl them or index their content. So if you want to improve SEO rankings for ADA-compliant websites, avoid using these features as much as possible. They’ll also help your site load faster, which is always a bonus.
5. Optimize Your Website’s Readability
Another important aspect of SEO is the readability of your website. It can make a huge difference in your search engine rankings since search engines take into account things like word count and how readable your content is. To improve readability, use shorter paragraphs and limit the size of your fonts as much as possible.
6. Fill Out All Meta Data Fields Properly
One of the most important parts of optimizing SEO for ADA-compliant websites is properly filling out all the metadata fields. This includes describing images with alternative text, setting the keywords, choosing titles for images and other visual elements, etc. The more information you can provide Google about your content, the better it will be indexed.
7. Choose Unique Titles For All Webpages
Regarding SEO for ADA-compliant websites, image titles are almost as important as page titles. Not only does Google use image titles to help determine what the content of your page is, but it also uses them to provide accurate search results. If you want to make sure that all of your pages receive accurate rankings, give each image on your page a unique title.
