SEO v Usability
The fist thing your visitors will see when they search for your site in Google or other search engines is:
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
This will all be in the SERPs
Your user will then probably forget all about the page title and meta description - unless they don't correspond to what your page is about, in which case, you've lost them anyway.
When an SEO or webmaster tries to over optimise a page the conflict between SEO and Usability really starts to show. When you try to cram keywords you end up confusing your user and the search engines, so this is counter productive and in the long term completely pointless.
If you stop to consider what the Search Engines are all designed to do you will see the value in usability for SEO. Search Engines have been developed to find the very best webpage for a certain query. For this reason it is very important that your content is well written with your end user in mind (for example a site targeted to teenage boys would probably be written in a different style to one advertising commercial roofing). Your page must also reflect the initial search query inputted by the user. Check out our video 'The Basics of SEO' for further information.
On-page Usability Features
Once the user is on the page they will start to look for Headings that correspond to their initial search query. For example if you found this page by searching for "SEO and Usability" you may be encouraged by the heading 1 and be inspired to read further. If you do your initial keyword research when choosing keywords then the distribution should be natural, and take far less effort than many people initially believe - indeed the effort with this aspect should mainly be placed on the choosing of keywords. The placement of keywords usually happens all by itself, so long as you use your common sense.
The imagery on your page should reflect the content. Make sure you provide meaningful ALT tags - if you can get a keyword in there then this is a bonus, but don't stuff ALT tags with keywords unless it is appropriate to the image. This is more of an accessibility issue, so we'll leave this important subject for another video blog.
The next thing your user is likely to look at is the copy. Make sure your copy is easy to read, punchy and to the point. Remember that people generally don't read online they skim. So, pick out important words in bold text, use em tags to italicise your keywords, like this: Usability v SEO .
You can further emphasis your standing as expert in your field by providing other pages that you can link to from within your text. This is especially useful in optimising blog pages, as you can easily interlink your posts to send your visitors to other pages that they may find interesting. You'll notice that I have applied this rule to this page, by linking back to a page about accessibility and SEO.
Once your visitor has had enough of your page, hopefully they found it interesting, entertaining or useful in some way, they will begin to look around for further reading, your contact details or related topics of interest to them. For this reason it is very important that you ensure your navigation is clear and consise. Place it 'above the fold' to ensure it doesn't get missed or overlooked. And finally, code your navigation using unordered or ordered lists like this:
<ul><li>Home</li><li>Internal Page 1</li><li>Internal Page 2</li></ul>
This will end up looking like this:
- Home
- Internal Page
- Internal Page 2
You can style your lists using CSS, but as this is a Web Design issue, we'll leave that for now.
Visit our Video Blog to watch our short film about Usability V SEO.