With SEO, Usability Equals Visibility by Brandon Cornett
By increasing your website's usability, you're making the reader's job easier.
This can dramatically improve your conversion rates. But that's not the only
thing usability contributes to your site. Most usability improvements also
improve search engine visibility by making it easier for search engine spiders
to crawl through the site.
In other words, usability equals visibility. So here are seven ways to make
your website more usable for people and more visible to search engines.
1. Limit the use of Flash.
Client-side plugins like Flash tend to reduce both usability and visibility,
albeit for different reasons. When used carelessly, Flash can frustrate users
and send them packing. Overuse of Flash also reduces search engine visibility,
because search engines can't decipher your Flash movies. Actually, Google can
index Flash files and offer a text representation of them, but you won't like
the way it looks!
I'm not saying "All Flash is bad." I'm saying that many of the Flash
implementations I see reduce both usability and visibility. If you're going to
use Flash (and you care about SEO), contain your Flash within its own space,
and offer textual content in addition to the Flash movie. For examples, check
out Adobe.com, WebTrends.com or ClickTracks.com.
2. Have at least one basic text menu.
I've seen it time and time again -- dynamic menus preventing internal pages
from developing the visibility or ranking they deserve. I've worked with a lot
of sites that only have dynamic, Javascript-heavy navigation menus, and they
all have one thing in common. The home page will be indexed, frequently crawled
and well-ranked. But the internal pages will be virtually invisible.
When you have a Google PageRank of five on your home page but zeroes across all
of your internal pages, something is wrong.
I'm not saying to stop using Javascript-based menus completely. But you should
know that they're hard for search engines to navigate. Some search engines,
like Google, are getting better at crawling dynamic menus. But they still tend
to choke on them.
There's an easy fix to all this. Simply create an alternate, text-based menu at
the bottom of your site. It won't change the look and feel of your site, but it
will improve your site's usability and visibility.
Keep the "fancy" menu to impress your visitors, if that's important to you. But
add a simple text menu to help search engines find, index and evaluate your
internal pages. At the very least, have a text hyperlink to your site map,
which will help search engines find their way inside. And speaking of site
maps...
3. Create a site map.
First, let me explain what I mean by site map. In this usage, I'm talking about
a site map page of your website that lists all of your important pages. I'm not
talking about an XML site map that you put on your root folder for search
engines to crawl. Both have value, but I'm only talking about the web page
version in this article.
In this discussion, a site map is simply a page that lists all of your other
pages (or most of them) as hyperlinks.
Site maps help people find the information or page they're after. They also
help search engines crawl your entire website, while offering descriptive
hyperlinks to help the engines understand your site's overall theme.
If you have a small to medium-sized website, you could link to every one of
your pages. If you have a larger website, it's probably best to focus on your
most important, top-level pages.
4. Write specific title tags.
Title tags can be a small change with big impact. I've worked on a lot of older
sites with solid PageRank and link popularity, but weak title tags. The title
tags on these sites were usually too general to be in line with any kind of
search activity. So my first action would always be to rewrite the title tags,
making them more descriptive and incorporating key phrases. This single
adjustment can have dramatic results, especially on older websites.
On the SEO side, title tags help search engines understand what a page (and by
extension a website) is all about. On the usability side, descriptive title
tags help people understand what your site is about, especially when they see
it listed on a search engine results page with nine other sites.
5. Cross-reference related items.
Here's an easy way to improve your usability and visibility on every page of
your site. Recommend related items. At the bottom of an article, for example,
you might have "Related article" followed by the keyword-rich title of a
related article. About.com does this well.
On the SEO side, this increases your internal linking profile, improves the
"crawlability" of your site, and helps search engines understand the theme of
your site. On the usability side, this helps readers find related information,
improves the "stickiness" of your site, and enhances your overall navigation
scheme.
6. Unwrap your PDF files.
Search engines can index PDF files, and they will assign them some value based
on their titles. But a PDF does not compete with a web page when it comes to
SEO. So if you "unwrap" your PDF files by making web pages out of them, you
give the search engines more information to read, understand and evaluate. As a
result, your rankings will improve. You can still add a "Download PDF version"
link on each page, if you want.
On the usability side, you improve the reader's experience by giving them the
option of reading the page now or downloading the PDF for later. You're also
eliminating the surprise of having unmarked PDF files. People expect links to
go to web pages, unless they're labeled with PDF, WMV or some other application
type. Don't launch someone's Acrobat program unless they're expecting it.
7. Offer descriptive content.
I hate mystery websites. You know, the ones that practically hide what they're
selling, promoting or offering. You've seen these sites before. They're often
85% Flash or image-based, with the occasional snippet of text here or there.
And where they do have text, they often use poetic, meaningless language that
some junior copywriter labored over in hopes of a creative award.
I leave these kinds of websites without any idea of what they offer, and I
leave quickly. Search engines leave the same way, without the precious data
they need to evaluate the site and determine its meaning. Without descriptive
content to support each of your pages, products and services, you're depriving
two audiences -- potential customers and search engines.
Don't ever let a creative agency tell you that people don't read websites. A
truer statement is "people don't read bad websites, or irrelevant websites, or
poorly organized websites." But if somebody wants what you're selling, they
will read everything you offer before picking up the phone or pulling out their
wallet. The question is, are you offering them anything?
The right people will read the right content 99 times out of 100. Search
engines will read your content 99 times out of 100. So why not capitalize on a
sure thing?
* You may republish this article online if you retain the byline and the active
hyperlinks below. Copyright 2006, Brandon Cornett.
About the Author
About the Author
Brandon Cornett is the author of The Agent's Guide to Search Engine Visibility,
a 130-page SEO training kit designed specifically for real estate agents. Learn
more about real estate search
engine optimization by visiting:
http://www.ArmingYourFarming.com/search
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