Joining SEO and Usability
This post was made Apr 27, 2009 by Carlos del Rio
Do-it-yourself SEO and other SEO novices often misapply SEO basics in a way that hurts usability. The traffic generated from SEO is wasted if visitors abandon the site because they don’t find it useful– no matter how high you rank.
Let’s talk about what can go wrong and how you can avoid it.
- Keyword stuffing in headers: It is important for SEO to insert keywords in headlines (h-tags) and opening paragraph, but it often detracts from the readability of a page when the semantic tags are not being used for their main purpose of indicating hierarchy. Joe Sugarman, renown ad man, said “the purpose of your first line is to get people to read your second line.” H-tags are intended to create shortcuts to specifics; if your H2 is the same as your H1 it is useless to your reader.
- Repetition of terms in body text: Keyword density is a popular concern for beginners. If you read it out loud and it sounds stupid you are going to lose many of your readers.
- Home pages: Many beginners overload the home page with links, because it is the strongest page. The purpose of navigation links is to help users navigate– if you give them choice paralysis you don’t accomplish much. The othere extreme of limiting navigation through low link number is also bad. If you don’t give any clues to where your content is people will leave also.
- Graphics and text: From an SEO perspective, lots of keyword-rich text can be valuable. Beginners often create dense keyword rich copy that doesn’t take advantage of white space to communicate. Pages that have been optimized for usability are usually clean, short, and have white space & images to support understanding. Keep you text and images separate, and take advantage of image optimization.
- Landing pages: Landing pages are critical for SEO and usability. They allow you to be very specific about messaging and context. However, if you build them from only an SEO perspective you will have a high bounce rate as a result of the cumulative effects of point 1 -4.
- Redirects/cloaking: Redirecting to better serve location, intent or referrer is a powerful usability tool– but poorly executed it is punished by search engines. Run careful testing of re-directs and avoid user-agent based redirects.
- Spelling: There is a gold mine in misspellings, still, but don’t be inconsistent. In cases like Real Estate vs Realestate choose one and stand behind it. But, be aware, improvements in search have greatly reduced the effectiveness of concatenation and misspelling as SEO tactics– and will continue to improve over time.
- Making individual pages for each piece of information: While visitors are willing to follow a click path the clearly leads where they are going you do not want to be breaking into chunks less than 250 words. Smaller than that and you lose some significant SEO opportunities and produce page times that are short enough to be annoying to all but your most driven visitors.
- Meta title tags: Google only displays up to 65 characters in the title, limited space communicate. Since the Vince Change brand has become more important to ranking, but that doesn’t mean it has to be in your title. Over-stuffing content in meta title tags can be a serious burden to your clickthrough rate and the communication of your search entry.
The purpose of a good SEO campaign is addressing the question: what is on this site. A usable site leads the user to the information they are looking for; regardless of entry point. In the end that leads to the indicators that search engines use to assess the quality of web sites– like links and retention of visitors. Even a successful search campaign can fall flat if you are not serving your users. Establishing clear goals and conversion events will help you understand specifically what your visitors need, as a opposed to generalizations about usability. I suggest you check out User Driven Change: Give Them What They Want chapters 2 and 3 to see some of the specific analytics performance indicators we recommend when testing design changes.
Stuffing keywords inside body and tags doesn’t seem to work as well now, and it’s better to have readers who come back than one-time passer-by’s. I’ve been reading your blog in an RSS reader, this is the first time I’ve come to your site and I must say it has one of the weirdest design I’ve seen in a while…
Well, welcome to the site.
There are still people who use stuffing as a tactic. I wanted to debunk some of the common beginner practices that will fall flat from a usability even if they are successful from a ranking stand point.
“Repetition of terms in body text: Keyword density is a popular concern for beginners. If you read it out loud and it sounds stupid you are going to lose many of your readers.”
-This is a problem that I had when I first started out. You want keywords and links, but you want visitors and returning visitors too. I had to go through and thin my text out and I did notice a change in traffic.