06 October 2006 | Author: James Foley

WAI ahead on the web - SEO lessons to be gained from the W3C's new Web Accessibility Initiative documents for AJAX, DHTML (WAI-ARIA)

Traditionally in SEO, good human site interaction results in good search engine interaction; however, is this still the case with modern web 2.0 techniques?

A well-known SEO principle is that conditions which affect disability access will consequently affect search engine spider access and, furthermore, good accessibility means good SEO. However, two areas of SEO - AJAX and DHTML - have already proven to be problematic for search engines as engines are, in certain circumstances, unable or unwilling to navigate them. They are also notorious for poor accessibility, as they can exclude users who have disabled JavaScript or who are using a browser that does not support the XMLHttpRequest object.

In an effort to combat these issues, the W3C has outlined an accessible strategy document for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. With W3C's new guidelines, will these problems be resolved once and for all?

From the outset, the document states that new technologies should be used to improve accessibility on the Web rather than to hinder it. It proposes the use of a 'role attribute' to define and identify the framework of live regions, for which values can be specified to build more accessible implementations. Much like an XML skeleton, it will wire-frame the application and allow for increased navigation as these 'role attribute' tags will exist in the classic OO class and sub-class inheritance structure. At present, this structure will be marked up RDF - Resource Description Framework.

These recommendations are good news for workers in SEO, as they will increase text based site structures that spiders will respond to. If a spider can avoid crawling code which it cannot identify as content, then the site will perform better in SERPs. Companies like Webcredible have already moved on to this, while Bindows have developed an accessibility framework for implementing AJAX.

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