Talk by Joe Hall
Search engine optimization and web accessibility share many of the same objectives. Those who provide consulting or services to either should understand this unique overlap to help improve each process. By working together with a shared understanding, we can build better web products for our clients, customers, and users.
Watch Joe’s Presentation
Transcript
Mike Demo: Hello, and welcome to the next session of the WordPress Accessibility Day. I am your host, Mike Demo, and helping us in the chat moderator, is Kayla Demopoulos.
Our next session is going to be by Joe Hall. Joe has been a WordPress developer and SEO for the last 11 years.
He first became interested in Accessibility Consulting back in the 90s, but mostly does technical SEO for medium-sized companies, non-profit, and enterprise-level brands. He is passionate about accessible, highly optimized, and fast WordPress themes.
Joe’s talk is going to be about SEO and Web Accessibility: Partners for a Better Internet. If you have any questions, please make sure to put them into the chat, and we will get those at the end.
And please remember that there is a code of conduct for this event, and we’re all part of the same WordPress community. Um, with that, thank you so much, and welcome, Joe!
Joe Hall: I am looking forward to this conversation! I’m gonna start my slides, here.
Um, okay so uh this talk is called uh SEO and Web Accessibility: Partners for a Better Internet. Um and I’m going to get started here.
Okay, so let’s get started with some definitions. Uh this talk is geared towards uh folks that are interested in SEO uh, but also for folks that are interested in accessibility obviously.
Um and so because we’re talking to uh two separate uh groups, I thought it might be smart to do some uh basic definitions, so that we’re all on the same page. And so when we talk about web accessibility, um web accessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring there is no barriers that prevent interaction with or access to websites on the world wide web, for people with all types of disabilities.
And when we talk about SEO, uh we’re talking about search engine optimization, uh the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic, by increasing the visibility of a website or web page to users of a web search engine. This may involve increasing rankings found within the results, or improving uh the presentation of existing listings or rankings.
And you know, something, one of the really interesting aspects of of SEO and web accessibility as a practice, if this is something you do professionally, or you’re just interested in it, um these two things can influence many of the same areas of product development. So they both touch on User Experience, Design and Information Architecture, Content Development, and Content Optimization and Technical Infrastructure uh.
So it makes sense that if there are so many overlapping areas that we should be working closer together with each other um. It might be smart to go uh to dispel some myths uh, because there are lots of myths around both practices um and it’s smart to be on the same page uh.
So myth number one: Accessibility is only focused on improving access for the visually impaired. I, I see a lot of SEOs with this uh, with this myth and and the truth is that um accessibility is focused on lots of different types of disabilities: Visual Impairments, Motor or Mobility Impairments, Auditory or Hearing Impairments, uh Seizure Disorders, uh Cognitive or Intellectual disabilities.
So we’re talking about a cross disability spectrum, not just visual impairments. Uh myth number two: SEO is only about optimizing content uh with keywords.
Um so this comes up a lot uh with with folks that have sort of a cursory understanding of SEO, but the truth is that SEO follows uh technical best practices. Um it looks at external signals such as, links or citations.
It informs the design or information architecture process and then of course it does focus on uh content optimization. Another myth that I hear a lot of SEOs make is that: excellent SEO means uh full accessibility or vice versa, and that full accessibility means excellent SEO.
And we’ll take a look in this talk about how the two practices uh overlap each other and how having good accessibility, can mean in some ways, that you do, when you’re doing the right thing for SEO, um and then vice versa with SEO for accessibility, but but it’s a it’s a myth to assume that just because you have great accessibility that somehow you’re going to do really well with SEO. Or that just because you have great SEO, that you know your website is accessible um.
That’s just not the case and we’ll, we’ll look into that uh in a moment. So let’s start talking about some of the areas of overlap and conflict.
I’ve put together a Venn diagram here and everything that’s listed on this diagram is of course not a complete list of either practice. This is just an example of some of the things that might be found in each area and how some things overlap.
And on the uh on the left side, here I have SEO and in the SEO quadrant of this Venn diagram I have listed: Page Speed, Structured Data, External Links, Mobile Indexing and AMP? And then on the Accessibility only section of the Venn diagram I have: ARIA, Screen Readers, HTML Landmarks, uh Keyboard Access, and Form Optimization.
Some of the main, you know shared areas, that overlap between SEO and Accessibility are: Information Architecture, uh we use some Anchor Text, Content Optimization and Media Optimization. And so we’ll take a look at some of these overlapping areas now and see how they work together and how sometimes they can cause conflicts as well.
Um, so we’ll start off with Information Architecture. So with navigation items um you know, for SEO, navigation items should follow the information architecture, have simple but descriptive labels and point to main sections of the site.
And you know for SEO, this is great, because uh these help build internal links uh site-wide, which helps spread link equity and helps the search engines find all the main sections of the site. For accessibility, navigation items should have a simple and descriptive labels and this is, you know, primarily for ease of navigation and uh those navigation items should be easy uh for the user to understand and find um easily.
Unordered list, uh so in HTML we have, you know, different types of lists. We have unordered lists and and numbered list.
Typically when we’re making an information architecture or or navigation uh, we’ll use an unordered list um and then also, we’ll use it also, for you know things like tertiary navigation as well on the page. Um search engines prefer organized content and clean HTML uh for navigation.
So an unordered list is really great for search engines, because they can easily understand that these links belong together as a set and they’ll either parse those um as uh parts of the featured snippet, if you’re doing things like featured snippet optimization um or other things. But for accessibility, uh screen readers will parse unordered lists of links for menus.
And so it’s it’s really helpful uh to think about organizing, you know, your your navigation um especially sub-navigation or tertiary navigations uh into unordered list, for both SEO and accessibility. Anchor Text: so this is our first item that has a little bit of conflict uh.
We’ll start with the SEO part of it. Search engines use anchor text uh to associate keywords within target pages that those links are linked to.
And so when we talk about anchor text, we’re talking about the text found within a link and so for SEO, uh search engines use that text to associate the terminology that should be associated with the page that the link is pointing to. And then for accessibility, uh screen readers will list links independently of content.
And therefore, anchor text should not rely on the context of the content um, it is found in. So in other words, your anchor text should never be like, you know, click here, or you know, download this.
That kind of thing. Um it should always be descriptive of the page that it’s linking to, so that when those links are pulled out of the content and and made into a independent navigation menu, it’s easier to understand what those links go to.
Some conflicts. So SEOs have a tendency uh to stuff a bunch of keywords within uh anchor text.
Like I said before, it’s because that anchor text can influence the terms that the search engines will uh associate with that target page. And so you want to make sure that as you are optimizing your anchor text, that that anchor text is also useful for accessibility.
You don’t want to just jam up a bunch of keywords in your anchor text so that when those links are taken out of the content mega menu, uh they still have to make sense. Uh so it’s really important for SEOs not to just jam up a bunch of keywords into the anchor text and make for a bad navigation for screen readers.
Let’s go to Content Optimization. So heading tags, you know, these are like your H1 H2, H3 tags uh for SEO they should structure the content with main and sub-headings, uh use tags consecutively and include the target terms.
And generally you want to use like one H1 tag per page and then underneath that use consecutive order, you know, H2 H3 uh, H4, you know, uh down. For accessibility, uh screen readers use uh these heading tags uh for content navigation um.
And so you again, you wanna use the same structure they would use for SEO um and use a very descriptive content within the heading tags that would describe the content for that section of the page. And so a good balance for SEO and accessibility, is that you know, you you can label the these heading tags with content that includes, you know, descriptive keywords that also describe uh the content that um the headings represent.
Title Tags: so title tags are a very important part of SEO um and so title tag should include unique targeting keywords for rankings of an increase, increased clickthrough rates. For accessibility, title tags should include unique terms for navigation.
Um, now a conflict that I see sometimes is that SEO sometimes include uh marketing language in the content in the title tags, uh such as clickthrough, uh calls to action, to increase clickthrough rates. And so basically the the reasons this happens is, because uh the search snippet, the what you see within the search results, that title there is taken from a title tag and so SEOs oftentimes like to write kind of eye-popping marketing language within the title tag to get users to click on uh their search result, within the search rankings um.
And that’s fine, but a problem with that is that, that can get in the way of providing a useful navigation item. If you think about title tags as sort of a way to navigate through the pages, either through using tabs on your browser, or navigation within a list of bookmarks, that kind of thing, you should always kind of keep your title tags um as easy to understand as possible.
And you can find a good balance between having a good call to action, but also making it so it’s, you know, kind of concise and easy to understand that’s the best method. Um, so Keywords and Language: so you want to use keywords for SEO of in a natural way.
You know historically SEOs have been kind of notorious about, you know, pumping a bunch of keywords in the content and trying to kind of force their content into those results. That’s no longer as popular anymore as it used to be, which is a good thing, because for accessibility, content should adhere to good readability standards and should be easily understood.
These two things really go together in my mind, because uh the search engines are starting to employ more and more natural language processing which attempts to understand the content the way a human being would read it. And so therefore, you know, using a bunch of targeted keywords, uh and writing your content in a way that doesn”t sound natural, may be not so smart for either SEO or accessibility.
So it’s always good to use natural language and to use content that that makes sense both for all users, you know, search engines and uh human beings. Hidden Content: so I saw this mentioned earlier today um in someone’s uh talk and for SEO, hidden content is not detected by search engines.
And in some cases it can be a violation of their quality guidelines. In accessibility, you can hide content from visual users um, but then make it accessible to screen readers um, And so there’s different reasons why you might want to do this.
So for example, you might have a completely separate navigation just for screen readers, but you don’t want that navigation to be visible to users, you know, visual users. And that’s understandable, but accessibility professionals should not hide content that is critical for SEO.
And this is just kind of common sense in a way, because if we follow the principles of universal design, then we are making all of the content, you know, kind of equally accessible to all different users. And so, you know, if there’s a special case where okay you have to hide a certain navigation just for screen readers, that’s understandable uh, but if you are hiding content just for screen readers and some of that content has links in it that is not available to the visual users, then those links are not going to be uh used for SEO.
So just keep in mind that, you know, when you’re hiding content, you need to keep things equal on both ends. You know, that same content that maybe is hidden from visual users needs to be kind of represented in some way um especially internal links, because those are very important for SEO.
So Media Optimization: so one of the things that SEOs talk about whenever uh accessibility comes up is alt tags for images um. And SEOs tend to like to optimize alt text for images, because search engines utilize the text found in um alt attributes uh to associate keywords for an understanding of the image.
And so I, I think initially when search engines started doing this, it was a really great idea, because you know if you use the alt tags the way they’re supposed to be, then you will include a very descriptive um description of the image. And so obviously the search engines thought, oh we can just take those out and we’ll know what the image is then.
Um and I think that’s true still today. However, one of the conflicts I found is that SEOs generally don’t write very good alt text.
They just stuff the alt text full of keywords. And I’ve actually noticed where it’s become a common place in WordPress, to basically just take, like the title of the post, and pop that into the image alt text or, or even if it’s, if you’re using something like WooCommerce, sometimes they’ll take like the product name and put that into the alt text of uh the product image.
Um in some cases that stuff works, but but if you’re if you’re a blogger and, you know, you’re writing about something, you have an image in your article, it’s likely that the title of the blog post is not going to match up with a description of the image that you’re posting. Uh so it’s really important not to do that kind of stuff, and it’s a really easy way I think to optimize the alt text, because, you know, if you have like 200 images that are missing alt text, it’s super easy just to go in and change your uh WordPress theme to do that, but in the end it doesn’t really serve uh your user, your users that use screen readers uh very much at all.
Um and oftentimes, it actually doesn’t really provide much value for SEO either uh, because they’re not really a good description of the image at all either uh. So, you know, it is kind of a pain in the butt, but it’s always better to write your own alt text by hand and not try to optimize it or or or automate it.
Videos: so I see a lot of folks that do videos and the obvious accessibility approach to videos is to include uh closed captioning. Um and closed captioning is, has become relatively more accepted, and a lot easier to implement.
I watch different platforms um. For SEO, what you can do is, you can take the same transcript of, for the closed captions and utilize that for SEO content.
Uh so you can put that on the same page as the video. If you have an embedded video, you can totally just take the closed captioning content uh and then put that on the same page as a, you know, video transcript.
And that turns into a really great optimized, SEO friendly content for the video um. And the same thing for podcasts.
You can, you can do the same thing for podcasts. Podcasts are very popular now.
Uh if you have an audio transcript, that can be placed on the same page um as uh the podcast is embedded in. And that creates a really great thing for SEO um and also for screen readers that would just read the uh audio transcript that’s on the page where the podcast um is embedded.
Um so that wraps up the majority of uh this talk and the talk went a little faster than I anticipated, but I do have some closing thoughts. So the best way to optimize for both accessibility and SEO is to work alongside amazing professionals that specialize in each.
And I really can’t stress this enough, because I feel like um SEO and accessibility, because it touches on so many different areas and because uh each one of the practices uh can be very detail-oriented and very specific to different types of websites, or are very specific and different types of clients, it’s really difficult to be a Jack or or Jane of all trades and do both. Uh so I would encourage everyone to make friends uh with an SEO or an accessibility professional, and encourage them to work alongside you, and and develop projects together and share in your own experience um to to build uh better products.
Of course, you can both learn about each other’s, you know, fields and and do the best you can, but it’s really important to have someone that really knows what they’re doing um and with lots of experience. My name is Joe Hall and you can reach me at these websites and at the end here I’ve included some more reading for the SEO folks.
Here’s some further read on accessibility. And then for the accessibility folks, here is some further reading on SEO.
That is it.
Mike: Cool, great job.
A lot of great information in there Joe, so we have some questions that we’re going to uh go through and we’ll see how many time, um questions we have time for. If you still have questions, that’s cool.
Kayla’s still posting them. Please just put them into the chat.
So the first question is: Do you have any recommendations for making sure you’re using appropriate language for users in SEO?
Joe: I think that you need to primarily, I’m sorry Mike, did you say for users and SEO, or for accessibility and SEO?
Mike: Sure um let me repeat it. Do you have any recommendations for making sure you are using appropriate language for users and SEO?
Joe: Okay, so you should just, I mean, really you should write um like you would if you were not focused on SEO. I mean, in my opinion uh there are lots and lots of factors uh that go into ranking a web page.
And if you are mindful of the types of terms that you want that web page to rank for, you can utilize those terms um you know intentionally, uh here and there um, but you don’t need to uh, you don’t need to, you don’t need to um, you don’t need to over optimize and use too much. You can uh, you can just, you know, use your natural language and and talk as if you uh, as if you would in any other format.
You know, um use some terminology intentionally if you are thinking of certain things, but you know, just just talk like you normally would, you know.
Mike: Sure and a similar question uh that I actually have, is: How do you SEO for language, you know, now that pronouns are becoming a bit a bit, you know, different and, you know, they could be they/them pronouns.
Is SEO catching up when you use those less traditional pronouns in your copy?
Joe: Yeah, it’s a really good question.
I had never thought of that. So I think that one of the things that we talk about about SEO, is something called query intent, and so understanding why someone is searching uh for your content um and um.
I can’t imagine a situation where gendered pronouns would require, what would like really be required uh, because, you know, a lot of times we think about SEO, we’re thinking about uh proper nouns. You know, like we’re thinking about, like you know, the names of things and people you know.
And so, I don’t think that it really matters too much about what kind of pronouns you use. If you wanted to use like uh non-gendered pronouns, I think that would work the same way, you know.
I will say that, and this goes back to like query intent, if what you’re, if what you’re publishing could be searched for verbatim, then you don’t maybe want to like change the pronouns, right. So like, if you have like a text that’s maybe really well known, like lyrics or something like that, um it it might be tempting to go in there and take out all the gender pronouns, but but it probably would not be great for SEO, you know, but but again like I said, I can’t imagine a way that they would, that that would cause an issue.
I, I don’t think so, um yeah.
Mike: We have another question, um from the chat: What are the easiest wins for us to fold into our accessibility work in terms of SEO?
I know you touched on this a little bit on your talk.
Joe: So I think an easy, uh some of the easy wins is uh to think about, like like I mentioned with uh some of the captioning, content and some of the um, some of the transcripts for podcasts.
That kind of stuff. Like you know, for example with YouTube for example, you know, if you have a captioning transcript that you uploaded with your video on YouTube, um go ahead and paste that into the description of the YouTube page.
Um and that will help that YouTube video rank higher uh in search engines um, because that content is inaccessible to the search engines. Um that’s a really good easy win.
Um another easy win is to think about how uh, how your heading tags are are optimized. You know, you for for accessibility, you want your headings to to be descriptive of the content you know um, but if you can pull that off while while also like plopping in a keyword here and there that that might work really well for that page, uh for SEO, that’s a really smart move.
You know, um and the title tag as well, like you know, really you know for accessibility, you want really easy to read title tags, but if you can kind of combine that with the proper keyword usage that that really helps too, you know.
Mike: Yeah I’m always a big fan of taking content you’ve already created and getting more leverage out of it.
So if it’s video content, taking the captions or the transcriptions. . .
Joe: Absolutely.
Mike: Podcast same thing. On that same note, do you um, there are obviously like free captioning and translation tools and then you can pay like a service like Rev to have it human edited.
Do you think it’s worth to pay for a professional to make sure that it’s verbatim and like there’s no errors in the computerized translation? Or do you think the computerized, you know, the automated stuff that’s either cheap or free is good enough?
Or does it depend on the project?
Joe: Uh for captioning?
Mike: Yeah.
Joe: I think it’s probably a good idea to
Alexa: I’m not sure
Mike: Bye Alexa, sorry.
Joe: Okay, I think it’s probably a good idea to go ahead and um integrate some humid, some human editorial stuff on your captioning. Um you know, one of the things I like to do is uh I’ll go ahead and like upload a video to YouTube and I’ll let the YouTube’s um automated, you know, captioning project uh do the captioning and then I’ll go back and edit those myself, because it saves me a lot of time of versus having to go out and like actually edit, you know, everything.
There is some stuff you can do like, I, I work in, you know, digital marketing, so sometimes we’ll have like uh video content made um and when we do that we’ll have a script written ahead of time um. And if you do that, then you’ve already got it written, you’ve already got the captioning written right there.
You just have to put in the time stamps for it um. So I think a good balance between the automated and me uh and the human kind of uh approach is best, you know. Yeah.
Mike: Sure um yeah, you know get the head start on the automated stuff and then clean it up a little bit yourself.
Excellent. Another question we got on the chat is: How important is alt attributes in SEO ranking and accessibility?
So it’s important for uh for SEO. It’s important for image search.
So when you go to Google and you go to the Google image search and you, you know, type a questionnaire or some keywords you get a bunch of images. Uh that’s how Google ranks those images, is by using alt text and then also the text found around the image.
Um and so for SEO, that that’s what, that’s really important. Uh but for uh accessibility, obviously uh that’s very important for uh screen readers and, you know, like I mentioned before, um having a good balance between the two is important.
Um I really think it’s important to maybe go the accessibility route more when doing alt text. Uh and if you’re able to throw in some keywords that’s great uh, but at the end of the day you don’t want to just jam a bunch of keywords into the alt text, because that’s not really good accessibility, at all.
And and honestly it’s not really good for SEO either. SEO needs to be natural language, needs to have, make sense to human beings and and search crawlers, you know.
Mike: Yeah and I know Twitter, I believe, just launched their alt text feature for images [unitelligible].
Joe: Yeah they did.
It’s been really nice um and that’s been good because Twitter actually ranks really well uh for SEO. And so it’s good for them, because they’re probably picking up a lot of uh a lot of new image searches, uh because of that um, but it also helps rank their images uh for people searching on web too, you know.
So that’s good.
Mike: Yeah we have another question.
It says: Would you say that the argument that accessibility professionals should not hide content also argues that if designers want text hidden, maybe it’s better for all users that it stay visible?
Joe: Uh I’m not sure I understand the last part of that question.
Mike: Yeah, so I’m not exactly sure on the context here. I kind of just read it.
So, maybe there is uh a user interface that maybe some text is hidden unless there’s a certain element um engaged with, versus maybe showing that uh text at the first.
Joe: Okay, yeah yeah I understand now.
So for SEO um Google’s crawlers uh utilize Chrome. So they actually, like Google’s crawlers actually is based on Chrome now um and so what it does is it it renders the page as if it’s being opened in Chrome.
However, it does not utilize a mouse uh. So user interface interaction um does not really help with the SEO, so so content is hidden behind a a tab or a module or or something that requires you know like user interface, a user interaction, um SEO or search engines will not see it.
Now this is actually a a kind of a debated topic among SEO nerds um, but generally speaking we have to go with what Google says and they say they don’t, you know uh they don’t surface content that’s not you know visible without um without user interaction. Now that being said, like you know, screen readers for example, um a lot of websites hide uh separate navigations just for screen readers.
Um and I think that that that’s fine um, you know, if if you are hiding content that’s that’s just for screen readers uh, just make sure it’s the same content that would be needed for SEO. Well you know, you don’t want to hide anything that could have value from an SEO perspective.
Um you want to keep everything kind of visible um and you know so that search engines can parse it and utilize it, you know, in a visual format.
Mike: Uh certainly.
Another question we got is: How do you prioritize to give focus to client content to rank more positively with SEO?
Joe: How do you prioritize clients?
Mike: How, I’m trying to parse the question, so I’m I’m I’m guessing, they’re mean like, how do you work with clients to make sure that they get their message across, but you can do your job. You know SEO, like that balance between what the client copy wants and then also what the project requires.
Joe: Yeah yeah, so so that’s a difficult thing um. One thing that, and I mean I got, I could probably write a book on this question uh, but I won’t uh.
So one thing that you can, it obviously is different for every client, right. So some clients are going to be more flexible and be willing to change uh for SEO uh.
Some clients are not. Um I think what you need to do as a professional is, on your own time, prioritize what’s worth uh fighting for and what’s what’s not worth fighting for um.
Some things you need to understand that, you know that it’s the right thing to do, but really is it going to move a needle for SEO? Probably not, so you don’t really need to argue about it with your client, you know.
Um you can uh in some cases, and I do this a lot, in some cases you can try to convince your client to create a whole different piece of content. Like I say, okay you can keep this, you know, because a lot of times clients like to have pages for things like paid search or social, uh channels, that kind of stuff and that and those things just don’t work with SEO content and so you can say okay we can keep these pages to use for advertising and that kind of thing, but let’s create like a a sister page that covers the same topics, but is well optimized for SEO.
Um and that usually works out really well, because then you can focus all your time and priority on what we call, we call those like SEO landing pages. Focus all your time and priority and SEO kind of uh perspective on those pages and they get to keep, you know, their other content um and do whatever they want with it, you know.
Mike: Sure, and our last question is: What are your thoughts um because you could, I’m just gonna summarize it. They’re talking about keyword stuffing in the alt text and, you know, what are your thoughts on that, but they had added added the specific question about adding hashtags into alt text.
Joe: I’ve never heard of that um, so I mean I I don’t think there’d be much value in that at all um, unless that hashtag was something that you think people are gonna search for on image search uh, but I don’t really see that. I mean, like like I said before, you really have to understand your query um your query uh intention and you know you’re you’re, what is the, you know motive behind searching uh query intent, you know.
And if, if you think that users are going to be searching on image search uh for a hashtag, then yeah you can put that in your alt text um. I don’t really know if that’s really beneficial um, but I don’t see a problem why you couldn’t do that uh.
Again, like you know, alt text is for accessibility uh first and foremost. So if the image is somehow related to that hashtag and that makes a good description of the image then absolutely do that, you know.
Mike: Sure, um we have a few more minutes so I’m gonna ask a question that I have that I wondering your thoughts on. Do does, do TLDs affect the SEO, because you got there’s a lot, there’s a new TLD every week you know: .vegas, .design, .vote, . nyc?
Joe: So, the answer is yes and no. So the answer is this uh, from a technical standpoint, no.
Like from a technical standpoint the algorithm kind of judges all TLDs the same. From a realistic standpoint there are a lot of other factors involved with SEO um and you have to ask yourself, like at scale, we’re not talking about, like you know, you know, small stuff.
At scale, how easy is it going to be to get someone to link to, like a .network or a .market, you know? Like there’s all these different TLDs now and .com tends to be the preferred one still, because it has the public interest, you know. The public knows about that.
It’s like in commonplace, you know, uh language now. So you know all these other TLDs uh it’s hard to explain to people that that might be linking to you, but oh no it’s not .com, it’s .market or you know something that they maybe didn’t even know existed, you know.
Um and so I would say that you know from a, from a, technical standpoint no you know, TLD doesn’t really matter too much um. It does matter though from a practical standpoint and how easy is it going to be to attract the needed signals.
And I would suggest that everyone pass their domain through the telephone test, which is like you know, trying to tell uh trying to tell, you know, someone the name of your website address over the telephone and how easy is that to do uh without having to like spell it out. That kind of stuff.
If your domain name can pass the telephone test, then it probably will work well for SEO, you know. Mike: Cool.
Well, I want to thank you so much uh Joe for your time. Everyone you can get his deck on the website of the event, wpaccessibilityday.org to view his slides. And you’re also on Twitter if people want to continue the conversation, correct?
Joe: Yeah please uh join me on Twitter @joehall. Mike: Uh please when you’re on Twitter, please uh tweet at us @wpaccessibility.
Our hashtags are #wpaccessibilityday and #wpad2020. Up next at the 1 o’clock UTC time is Adam and his topic is Accessible Navigation from Scratch.
So again, thanks to Kayla for moderating the chat and I’ll be back with you in about 15 minutes. Thanks.
Additional Resources
WP Accessibility Day has not assessed speaker-provided presentation resources for accessibility.
Do you have any recommendations for making sure you are using appropriate language for users and SEO?
What are the easiest “wins” for us to fold into our accessibility work in terms of SEO?
Would you say that the argument that accessibility professionals should not hide content also argues that if designers want text hidden, maybe it’s better for all users that it stay visible?
How important is ALT attributes in SEO ranking and accessibility?
How do you prioritize give focus to client content to rank more positively with SEO?
I’ve seen hashtags in ALT text which seems similar to keyword stuffing in the old days. Seems this would hurt our SEO efforts. What’s your opinion on adding hashtags?
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