SEO and Usability

SEO and usability are very closely related. Without the proper SEO your site won’t be found by potential customers. However, if your site is performing in the listings but not properly designed for usability, you will struggle to convert your traffic into hard sales.

It is therefore in your best interests to design a site that can cater for both SEO and usability. This will help turn your traffic into purchases and leads.

Search engines are getting more complex and can now collect data about the basic usability of your site. For example if your site is regularly bookmarked in popular bookmarking sites such as del.cio.us, Stumble Upon, and Digg. Search engines can index these popular bookmarking sites and from this information evaluate how popular your site is, hence how usable.

Another factor search engines can look into to evaluate your usability is the amount of high power links you have pointing to your site. Powerful sites tend to only link to articles/pages on your site which present related information and can be easily navigated by users.

You can check usability factors on your site yourself to by analyzing data from Google Analytics, which can provide you with important data such as the bounce rate of your site, and the length of time users spend on this site. A usable site tends to have a lower bounce rate, and users tend to spend longer on the site.

So what can you do?

Firstly think about the hierarchy of your site, a clean and easily followed navigation structure is essential for both SEO and usability. This could be enforced with the use of breadcrumb navigation, which was discussed on a previous Blog of mine.

Remember to design your site around your visitors, display the information your visitors want to see. Try to design the site so that users are never more than 3 clicks away from reaching their goal.

Paul
SEO Programmer

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