Good user experience is fundamental for the success of a website:
On the Internet, it’s survival of the easiest: If customers can’t find a product, they can’t buy it. Give users a good experience and they’re apt to turn into frequent and loyal customers. But the Web also offers low switching costs … Only if a site is extremely easy to use will anybody bother staying around. – Usability guru Jakob Nielsen1
While Nielsen probably had site design and information architecture in mind, his point also encompasses search engine visibility. Without search engine visibility a website is hidden away on a dead-end street instead of being front and center on main street2, where the people are.
For web interface designers and copywriters, the sad truth is that the best user experience in the world just doesn’t matter if users cannot find a site in the first place. The good news is that website user experience best practices and SEO best practices are usually complimentary. A deeper understanding of complimentary nature of SEO and Usability can be very helpful in justifying SEO and Usability expenditures. In the sections that follow, we’ll see how many aspects of SEO are directly linked to good user experience techniques and vice versa.
SEO?
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is about driving traffic, usually qualified traffic, to a website. Search engine optimization professionals will identify the keywords and keyword phrases people in a business’s target demographic are likely to use when searching for products and services. SEO practitioners will then work with a company’s marketing and IT staff to convince search engines that this site is indeed authoritative for these keywords.
While SEO is often associated in many people’s minds with ranking reports, advanced internet marketing professionals focus today on a more comprehensive picture ranging from user search behavior right up to conversion, the completion by a user of an activity aligned with a business goal.
Site labeling terminology = SEO keyword opportunities
Help users and search engines alike by choosing terminology used by site visitors when defining site labels and navigation elements. Avoid using specialized terms and jargon if they aren’t part of user’s vocabulary. Not only will site visitors feel more at home, but you will be using the very keywords and keyword phrases your potential site visitors will be typing in search engines to find you.
Site navigation elements
Good website navigation facilitates discovery and understanding of your site’s pages by visitors and it can encourage visitors to stay a bit longer, reducing bounce rates (users abandoning the site). Site navigation also helps search engine crawlers find and evaluate website content.
A main menu will help direct a user, and search engines, to the principal thematic areas of your site – typically answering the who, what, where questions.
Bread crumbs show users where they are hierarchically, especially important if a search engine has put them right in the middle of a process flow (a search engine can and will send a user to virtually any public page of a web site).
Internal Linking Generous internal linking within website content helps users immediately explore related material while sending search engines a strong signal about the interrelated thematic nature of your site’s content.
Cross selling (see also) links for a hard drive “See also” links at the end of an article, common in many content oriented sites such as blogs and newspapers, offer users direct navigation to related items of potential interest. They can also be used to cross sell related objects. Sites with many items, such as E-commerce sites, will probably want to use structured categories to facilitate user browsing while providing keyword rich internal links to search engines. Content oriented sites, such as newspapers, magazines and blogs might consider unstructured tag clouds (used in this site) as well.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web Simple text link menus are the best search engine friendly choice and will work even if a user doesn’t have a Flash or JavaScript enabled browser. Use CSS to turn plain Jane links into menus the competition will envy. Avoid using drop down lists as a navigation tool – while Google is getting better at interpreting some forms, it is better to avoid problems in the first place.
Benjamin: there’s a great future in links, think about it. Will you think about it?3
Even if your knowledge of SEO is cursory at best, you have probably heard that search engines like links. This shouldn’t be a big surprise. The web wouldn’t be a web without the interrelationships enabled and defined by links. Search engines use link placement within a page along with their overall frequency to better understand the importance of a target page. The underlined descriptive text used in a link, the link anchor text, helps search engines, and users, better understand the content of a target page (avoid the click here trap). Keep this in mind when working on site navigation elements described above.
The importance of substance, textual substance
Search engines like Google have historically had a bias toward textually rich content, especially html documents rich in semantic clues (e.g. titles, descriptions, headings, emphasis…). Multimedia formats are surely becoming an important element in a SEO strategy as evidence by the maps, videos and images which often appear in search results today. Yet in most sectors sites should still get the basics right before focusing on multimedia SEO.
For E-commerce sites, each individual product description page should be original and include as much information as may be useful to end users. The richer and more original the information, the more interesting the product page will be to search engines.
Rethink that flashy Flash
For many sites, style, such as a fancy flash animation seems to win out over good usability. Well guess what, dancing, singing animated sites can be a user turn-off. There’s a good reason that “skip intro” became an essential part of Flash splash pages before the Flash welcome page novelty began to wear off. If you think your user community may include people browsing from their office cubical, than sound effects are a no-no. Suffice to say, there are at least 7 SEO and other reasons to avoid flash and this hasn’t changed despite what you may have heard to the contrary.
Alternative terms for alternative folks
Consider opportunities to mix and match synonyms if they are appropriate keywords for your visitors when choosing terms for your site information architecture and site copy. This technique can assist usability if well executed, although there is a risk of inconsistency if done in a haphazard fashion.
Crafting the search results
Contrary to popular belief, a top listing in SERPs for pertinent keywords in Google or other major search engines isn’t enough to guarantee web marketing success. The search engine result, or listing if you will, must actually convince a user to click on it. In a world full of charlatans and internet viruses, this is more difficult than one might think.
Fortunately, techniques to facilitate search engine click through align nicely with ranking relevancy factors. Standard web search results in Google and most engines are composed of a title, summary and a URL. A web author can almost always influence the title and URL and can often determine a result’s summary.
The Title
A search engine result title is usually taken from a web page’s <title> tag. A web author should succinctly describe the page’s content (or site’s content in the case of the home page) in a way which convinces the web navigator “this is the result for me“. The title should thus contain a user’s most likely keywords or keyword phrases neatly woven into a description which entices the user to click through to the site. These same keywords are a strong ranking signal for search engines. Do avoid the temptation to stuff the <title> with a laundry list of keywords. If the title is “too long”, say more than ~60 characters (this varies from search engine to search engine), it will be truncated with an ellipsis indicating something has gone missing.
Crafting a good title is an copywriter’s art and what works for one page may not be good for another page. That said, do try to get to the point as soon as possible. In western languages that means your keyword or words should appear as far to the left as reasonably possible.
In some cases, the title may be taken from a DMOZ listing or a Yahoo! Directory. This can be suppressed with the noodp or noydir meta tags:
<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />
The summary or snippet
Search engines generate a page summary or abstract to further describe a page’s content for the search engine user. Google will often use a page’s meta description content verbatim if it contains a user’s keywords. While the meta description is unlikely to significantly influence ranking in most search engines, it is an important opportunity for a page’s author to succinctly describe the value of the page to a web navigator, motivating them to click through in the process. The meta description is also used by some social media sites to describe a submitted page. Should you deem a summary not appropriate for a page, there is a Google option to suppress it:
<meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet" />
Yahoo, and later Google, has recently begun to enhance summaries for a limited set of result types. Consider using semantic web standards to encapsulate data where possible.
The URL
Many eye tracking studies have noted that users will quickly scan search result URLs when attempting to determine which result is most relevant to their query. Long and complex URLs will put them off. Try to hide parameter complexity. Particularly avoid session ids which often present security issues as well.
Besides being ungainly for end users, page URLs containing various combinations of parameters can make it difficult for a search engine to identify the definitive URL for a page (the rel=”canonical” syntax is available as a solution of last resort). A keyword or two in the URL can help convince users that your result is THE result for them. Note that Google considers the dash as a word separator and thus should be used instead of an underscore. Don’t fret too much on this point if you are already using underscores, it is doubtful that keywords in URLs are a strong ranking factor. Do avoid characters which need to be escaped.
Landing pages: did we land on Mars, or a website?
A search engine can and will send a user to virtually any page on a web site. Thus, a SEO practitioner will most likely remind developers and marketing teams that every public page of a web site is a potential “home page”.
Each page should be able to satisfy an entering visitor based on the intent of their visit. The intent will be expressed by the keywords in the user’s search engine query – keywords which are most likely at the core of the page’s purpose. Should the landing page not directly respond to a user’s query, a well designed site navigation system can put them in the right direction. In the case of a multiple step process, visual elements, such as buttons or bread crumbs, such make it clear what the user needs to do to proceed or “go back”.
Conversion, the often overlooked SEO holy grail
As much as a SEO professional might be passionate about search engine algorithms and searcher behavior, search engines are just conduits of traffic to a website which should have one or more business goals (some may argue that visibility in search engines also accomplishes branding, a fair point).
If a business is looking for more than branding, a search engine user needs to be convinced to visit the site. Yet in most cases, that isn’t enough. The site now needs to deliver on the promise made in the SERP. If a user doesn’t find what they were looking for in short order, they will simply abandon the site. Regardless of a site’s mission, a site will most likely want a user to perform a determinate action aligned with a business goal. The solution?
Don’t make me think – Steve Krug [UK link]
Through a call to action a user is enticed to complete some sort of process or action, referred to as a conversion. It is this conversion which is the real SEO end game. 
Research-Based Web Design & Usability GuidelinesPoor conversion rates can be due to a mismatch between SEO results and user intent. User experience is also a major factor as usability issues can create significant obstacles to a user completing their goals. Typical usability impediments are related to visual communication (layout and design), textual communication (labels, copy) and/or technical flaws.
Free usability book
If you’ve made this far oh weary reader, you deserve a prize! How about a free book on website usability? If so, Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines (292 pages, 161 MB, view table of contents) is the book for you.
Thanks are in order to Nicola Mattina who, though ExperienceCamp, inspired this article.
1 http://www.informationweek.com/773/web.htm
2 or the high street if you prefer!
3 With apologies to The Graduate
Similar Posts:
- Flash is still a problem for SEO (and the web) despite Google announcement
- 8 reasons to avoid Flash (or Silverlight) like the plague when designing a website
- Google Crawling and Execution of JavaScript: where are we at today?
- Bing – features and SEO recommendations, one month on
- Harnessing the knowledge of the masses with Google
Registration is now open for the next SEO Course (March 22 and 23) and Google Analytics Course (March 14 and 15) in Milan. Don’t miss the opportunity!
Sean Carlos is a web marketing consultant & teacher, assisting companies with their Search (SEO + PPC = SEM), Social Media & Digital Media Measurement strategies. Sean first worked with text indexing in 1990 in a project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since then he worked for Hewlett-Packard Consulting and later as IT Manager of a real estate website before founding Antezeta in 2006. Sean is an 
This is an excellent post! You have really pointed out why holistic internet marketing is essential, if you don’t focus on the user experience in addition to SEO, your efforts are not nearly as effective – if at all. Usability is something that most SEO companies skip over when offering services to their clients, and only focus on keyword rankings.
User experience is very important. If the user has a hard time navigating through out the site than they will not want to come back to the site.
Great post. User behavior is center to conversions, building products and just about every reason we use the internet. The more we focus around humans and use the better the technology will work for us.
- Doug
http://professionalrecognition.com
Great and thorough article… duly bookmarked. I stumbled on this from a link in a comment on our own site with a related post; talking of the Paid search vs Organic search options for recruitment websites.