SEO vs Usability - Search Engine Optimisation Tutorial
Script:
Nick - Welcome to our SEO Video Blog, This week I am joined by my colleague Amelia while James is on holiday and today we are going to discuss SEO vs Usability. Amelia has experience in this field so it will be good to get her input.
Amelia - We are going to discuss the various aspects of a web page that a user sees while browsing a website and how SEO can effect this.
Nick - The problem starts when a webmaster or SEO tries to over optimise a page, meaning they try and add too many phrases. Cramming keywords can confuse your users and search engines.
Amelia - Search engines are designed to provide their users with the best possible search result. The content reflected on the web page must be related to the initial search query and be of a high standard. Nick and James mentioned ‘the basics of SEO’ on a previous video which discusses some simple SEO practices to gain success in popular search engines.
Nick - The initial contact that your user has with your site is usually the page title and meta description that is displayed in the search result, a meta description is an opportunity to attract potential users by writing something descriptive and relevant, where as your page title should be related to the search query.
Amelia - Then, once your user is on the page, the headings will be the first thing they look for. Be consistent with your SEO. This should be relatively simple and if you have done your research when picking keywords the distribution should fit naturally to your website.
Nick - The imagery of you site should again be consistent with your service or products and ensure that you include honest and descriptive alternative tags, This vergers onto accessibility which we will leave for another video blog.
Amelia - Copy - your copy should be related and well written. It should be short, snappy and to the point. It should also include ways of emphasising keywords, with strong tags (which makes text Bold) and secondary headings. You can also offer more information to the user through the use of anchored text, making sure the links land on pages that can further their reading.
Nick - Once a user is done reading a page, they then will look to move on, so a clear, obvious and concise navigation is vital. It also should be before the fold and be made using unordered or ordered lists (bullet points).
Amelia - We have linked our example page on the Creare Communications blog post at www.crearecommunications.co.uk/news, please feel free to add any comments to the blog post, thanks for watching.
Resource Links:
http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk/tutorials/seo-vs-usability/
