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My company's web-site is all about online games, so accessibility is not high on our priority list. SEO best practices, however, are. Searching on the net we couldn't find any discussion of whether or not ARIA is such a best practice (which is a kind of answer already :-). I found this surprising because using ARIA roles seems like a natural thing to do - they contain a lot of SEO-relevant meta-data (overall page structure, what parts of the page are the "main" as opposed to "service" navigation area, what parts contain "actual" vs. "related" vs. "independent" content, etc.). What's more, given they effect the user interface (screen readers and so on) they would tend to be pretty accurate when they exist.

Does anyone have specific knowledge about whether any search engines actually use this data, if it exists in a page?

A: 

Search engines like Google are pretty smart no matter how badly you set up your page, SEO relevant meta data or not.

The main thing is to make sure your page is marked up properly, that it validates and that you don't employ any "black-hat" techniques that could cause search engines to black list your page.

As for ARIA, I'm not sure if it's really going to make much difference one way or another.

Evernoob