Re: Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Thanks, Patrick!
 

    On Thursday, January 19, 2017 6:00 PM, Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk> wrote:
 

 On 19/01/2017 20:14, Mike Elledge wrote:

> SEO Expert opinion:
>
>  * Every image should have both an alternative description and a title
>    to optimize SEO.
>  * Adjacent text is important to SEO, so include it as well.
>
>
> Can anyone sort this out? I've found a couple of articles that say image
> titles have a minimal affect, but nothing that addresses this directly.

I would put the onus on the SEO "expert" to provide hard, measurable 
evidence that this is indeed the case.

I'll note that search engine algorithms have evolved over the years to 
not simply be dumb "text aggregators" that give higher weight to a page 
for particular key words based on frequency, but that the algorithms 
have become attuned to try and spot attempts at content-stuffing and 
artificial gaming for a rating boost.

Search engines try to weed out obvious attempts at overstuffing, and 
instead try (through heuristics, basic AI, etc) to rank pages based on 
their usefulness to actual human users. That's why my best advice would 
be: forget SEO experts and write content / code pages first and foremost 
with human users in mind, and trust that search engines' aim is to 
weight pages based on this, rather than any dumb keyword 
frequency/proximity.

(In fact, if algorithms suspect that a page is trying to stuff keywords 
unnaturally into a page, they will actually lower key scores for that 
particular term for the page)

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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