What is the ADA?
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a law, established in 1990. It’s a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the public. (Source: National Network ADA) This law gives individuals with disabilities rights that allow for equal opportunity in their everyday life.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing tactic that deciphers how high on search results your website appears before others. SEO is the process of improving rankings, driving traffic to your site, and increasing awareness of your site on non-paid search engines.
How do ADA and SEO complement each other?
ADA efforts benefit your website’s SEO by improving the readability of the website. For your website to be ADA-compliant, people with disabilities must be able to read and understand the content.
For multimedia to be ADA-approved, a readable transcript for audio-only media and video-only media is required. YouTube is the most popular video platform. It offers closed captioning for videos, but they are often inaccurate. Take the time to edit the closed captioning for accuracy. You’ll also need to give your video a title, description, and keywords. Having text connected to your video will allow people that are searching for a video like yours, to be able to find it easier. The more keyword tags you can add to your captioning, the better your SEO will be.
Another stipulation for your website to be ADA compliant is that all your images need a caption. You may think that if a picture has texts in it that will help with your SEO, but it won’t. Your photos must have tags on them which is also beneficial for your SEO. When your images are ADA compliant, they have more tags than non-ADA compliant websites, making your image’s SEO better.
Backlinks are any link on your website that links to another portion of your website. If your website is ADA compliant, it can’t have backlinks that say things like “Click here” or “Learn more.” Your backlinks must give a description of where you are going to be directed to if you click on that link, which helps with your SEO because the more times the word someone is searching for is mentioned on your website, the better your SEO will be.
At Vervocity in Quincy, IL, we take pride in our SEO skills and ADA compliance assistance, let us help you get the most out of your website. Call (217) 222-1451 for details!
