Improving website accessibility for people with disabilities should be high on the agenda for anyone seeking to optimise for search engines.

Ann Smarty, writing on Search Engine Journal, believes that accessibility actually extends to all users - the same technology which may help deaf people could also help those working in a noisy environment.

And there are other advantages too, for instance by improving accessibility it becomes easier for search crawlers to find the site, meaning accessibility and SEO web design go hand in hand.

She writes: "While we (surprisingly) seldom see accessibility issues discussed in [the] SEO community, search engine optimisers should definitely both explore and implement accessibility standards."

One example is images, where those that are an integral part of the page content should have alt text - this is what blind people will hear instead of the image and can also be picked up by crawlers, improving search engine optimisation.

However, alt text should not be used for merely decorative images.

While this is a fairly easy step, Ms Smarty also suggests providing written transcripts for all audio and video content, to aide deaf people and to provide more text for crawlers.

But this could be extremely time-consuming for a site with a lot of media content - so how much should accessibility be considered when dealing with smaller companies?

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