There are numerous articles pointing out the business advantages of accessibility. Many of these reflect the similarity between accessibility and SEO. However, despite the close technical relationship between the needs of disabled users and the technical requirements of search engine optimization, the fact remains that the two goals are not the same, are not equivalent, and do not reflect the same ultimate goals.
At their hearts, web accessibility and SEO are focused on optimizing different aspects of your web site: accessibility cares almost exclusively about the disabled user and their experience whereas SEO is focused firmly on your bottom line and your experience, as site owner, in the online aspects of running your business.
Read more: Web Accessibility is not SEO
A while ago (actually, quite a while ago,) Raj Krishnan of the Google “snippets” team posted a very interesting article on meta descriptions at the Google Webmaster Central blog. One of the key points was about “tagging” your meta description.
The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information — price, age, manufacturer — scattered throughout a page, making it unlikely that a snippet will capture all of this information. Raj Krishnan
Read more: Tagging your meta descriptions
Filed under Accessibility, Search Engines by Joe Dolson