Website usability deals with ease of navigation, how colors work together to enhance a user experience without hurting the eyes, the size of fonts, and design. But some of the concepts of website usability have a direct effect on how search engines crawl your website, and index it accordingly. So be patient when you explain the changes you want to make; sometimes, when someone knows WHY you're doing something a certain way, they're a lot more reasonable about letting you do it. They might also come up with an idea for doing something that accomplishes the same goal in a better way. Always do your best, but remember that there's a reason for the old saying that "the customer is always right." Website Usability and SEO - Navigation Usability Navigation A navigation path is a sequence of pages that the visitor viewed from the moment the visitor enters the site to the moment they leave, including navigation paths taken by search engine bots. Text Links – The best navigation system is one that contains text links, both for usability and for SEO. Hiding links within JavaScript or other unreadable code, or buried in Frames pages or images, doesn’t allow a search engine to follow your navigation system, and it also makes it difficult for those with accessibility issues to follow as well. The best solution for this is to include additional text links for visitors and search engines to follow. For example, one SEO working on redesigning a web site for a client in the real estate business found inspiration for the redesign from a section of the client's old site. That section showed images from the company's "home staging" business, where rooms in homes were redone to get the home ready for listing. The SEO worked with his client to make the redesigned site look as tasteful, elegant, and welcoming as those rooms, starting with the color scheme from one of the photos. Sadly, there's always the possibility that you and your client will end up with significant areas of disagreement. You might even find that your client is helpful about some things and adamant about others. Your client might be very attached to the site, especially if he designed it himself; it's his "baby" after all. Anchor text – Anchor text is the words used in a hyperlink to point a user to another web page or website. SEOs will tell you how important anchor text is for optimization because it is another opportunity for you to include your keywords, and tell a search engine why this link is relevant to your content. This is also important in a usability sense because it directs a visitor to the linked page while giving them an idea what the link is about. Using “Click Here” is really a waste of your SEO opportunity. What may seem to you as self-explanatory may not be as simple for your visitors. Having a button called “Knowledge Base” may not mean much to some people. Instead, if that button would simply be called “Help” it probably would assist them better. Choose a color scheme and stick with it; templates can also be a big help here. The site's new image should fit the industry and the owner. Remember that your client can be a great resource for this. You might get an enormous amount of help from the site owner and have a truly pleasant experience. Breadcrumbs - The breadcrumb trail provides information to users as to where they are located within the site, and it offers shortcut links for users to “jump” to previously viewed pages without using the BACK button, other navigation menus or buttons, or using a keyword search. Breadcrumbs also give search engines an easy navigation path to follow to find all the pages of your site. Redesigning a Site for SEO: an Overview - Look and Feel What about the site's look and feel? You will probably have to make some changes to make sure the site's navigation works well and visitors flow smoothly through the site. Above and beyond that, you may need to give the site a "face-lift." What image does the site owner want to project? Browsing a bank's web site should feel different from browsing a web site that sells homemade dip mixes, for example. Both can (and should) project a certain feeling of professionalism, but they will have different "personalities." The term “breadcrumb” comes from the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Hansel left a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods so that he and Gretel could find their way back home. Since today’s internet user will have a need to navigate back through a website path, the “breadcrumb trail” was named. Using breadcrumbs is not only a good idea for your visitor; it also gives search engine spiders a path to follow for every page within the website. When you're changing files and pages and such, make sure you do all the redirects correctly. This would be a good time to check your backlinks, too, and find out who is linking deep into your site. You'll want to consider building a custom 404 page as well, just in case anyone does get lost. If your folder structure is changing - and chances are it is - you'll also want to update your robots.txt file. You don't want your visitors to get lost; you surely don't want Google to get lost either! Titles – Using clear, concise titles will not only inform your visitors what your site is about when they find it in the search engine results, but it also helps a search engine determine the relevancy of your site to its indexed pages. A search engine has the capability of scanning the context of a web page, and determining if the title is indeed a good match. Visitors also don’t like to click on a search engine result with a title, only to find out that the web page has nothing to do with what they were looking for, and that the title was misleading. Make sure your titles are short, directly to the point, and most importantly, an accurate assessment of the content of the page. I won't go into how to do keyword research, since there are plenty of articles here on SEO Chat that explain that topic in detail. Depending on the field, however, you might find that you need to be careful with your tools. Richard Hearne discovered that some keyword research tools may deliver skewed results for certain phrases - because "a very large number of the reported searches are going to be executed for the purpose of collecting keyword data." The SEO/SEM field is notorious for this, with many searchers not interested in hiring services so much as finding out what their competitors are up to. Obviously, once you have the appropriate keywords, you need to use them in all the right places. That means title tags and site text; meta descriptions are more controversial in the sense that many insist the search engines don't look at those anymore. Still, there are places where you should include descriptions if they aren't already there, such as alt tags for images on the site. Avoid keyword stuffing; remember, those tags will be used in ways other than SEO. They get read by site reading software used by the blind, for example. Keep it short and sweet, and use any keywords sensibly. Website Usability and SEO - Directory and Font Considerations Directories and Levels A colleague, Mike Shapiro, who I consider to be a friend, once told me, “Remember the average clicker spends 7 seconds deciding whether to stick around.” Statistics show that web users like to visit sites that have what they need not more than a couple of clicks away from the home page or landing page. If a web user has to go through a dozen links in order to get to what they are looking for, they will very likely give up in frustration, and then move on to the next site offering what they need. Redesigning a Site for SEO: an Overview - Tackling the Basics Okay, you now have a feeling for the site, the site owner's field and its competitive landscape, and the goals for the redesign. Now what? Well, if it's an old site, I am a member of many search engine optimization forums from many years, and have analyzed that trends and webmaster problems change with every update regarding Google PageRank, Back Links problems, Supplement results from Google, banning of websites and having no website popularity after even making all things done properly. Well, I always say – “It depends”. Yes! It depends on – 1. Your website market or online product. 2. Your website strategy – means what’s the basic need behind the making of your website. 3. Your website look (it means design layout) – It should be visitor appealing so that he can bookmark your website and come back to it. 4. Your website navigation – it helps your web site's usability. 5. Make all of website URLs search engine friendly – Well, all static web pages are search engine friendly but if you are using a dynamic website with .asp or .php, please use server redirection (eg. mod_rewrite, 301 or 302 redirection) to make it into SE friendly URL. Now, we can move on web marketing or SEO facts for the website which you are going to promote in search engines. Let’s start with search engines king Google. Everybody wants their website rankings on the top pages of Google because we all are very well aware about Google search criteria, vast exposure and online marketing. If you can see from Google side, this search engine changes very rapidly in terms of updates. That time is gone when Google made updates every 3-4 months. But now, it is unpredictable.it may not have kept up with the most current trends in the field. You need to know what keywords searchers are using to find whatever your client offers. In the same way, many search engine bots don’t crawl more than a couple directory levels deep. If the meat and potatoes of your site is deep within the site structure, you can count on those pages not being crawled or indexed quickly, if at all. Even if you have a great navigation structure and breadcrumbs in place, it is very hard on a search engine server’s resources to have to crawl deeply into a website’s structure. You can expect to do a certain amount of education as to the nature of SEO and the kinds of results that can be achieved. You may find yourself gritting your teeth if you encounter one of those clients who expect to reach the top of the SERPs tomorrow. Be polite and courteous; you and your client will see a better site emerge from this job if you're working as allies than if you're butting heads. Try to have a clear goal in mind before you start changing the site, whether it's number of visitors, conversions, position in the SERPs, or what have you. With a project like this, you need to have something to work towards, else how will you know when your work is complete? (Granted, the job of an SEO is never really complete, since SERPs are dynamic, but you get my point). Fonts and Headings Font size and color – Using tiny text isn’t easy for web visitors to read, and if they have to struggle to read your content, there is probably a good chance that they won’t even try. Further, many search engines give more weight to text that is bigger than text that is small. It’s also important to a web visitor that they can read the text without having to strain their eyes due to the color of the font or the background. If you're the SEO in charge of redesigning your client's web site, you'll want to ask lots of questions. Your client may not be able to answer them all off the top of his head. Still, if you want to do a good job, it's helpful to know as much about the site and your client's industry as you can. How competitive is the industry? Who are your client's main rivals? When was the site last redesigned, and by whom? What was done? Do you have a history of the site's traffic and conversions for at least the last several months? Think of those questions as just your starting point. It’s difficult also for your web visitor to read flashing, scrolling, or blinking text. Search engines tend to disregard these things as well, so avoiding this type of font behavior is usually best. Don't look upon a site's age as all bad, however. Sure, a site that hasn't been redesigned in a long time looks old, but it has something a newer site doesn't: trust. Google and the other search engines look at a site that's been around for several years in the same way that a bank looks at a customer with a very good credit history built up over time. When you combine that status with a great site redesign, you can achieve excellent results.
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