Website Spider and Visitor Usability - Web Usability Guidelines
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Design a website using one of the widely accepted formats. Those formats usually include navigation areas, a header, content area and a footer. It's pretty straightforward. The key to remember is this: think of your main navigation as a SECONDARY way to navigate your website. The PRIMARY navigation tool is links within content.
When a visitor lands on a website, he focuses on the CONTENT area. Once a user finishes scanning content, he naturally looks for links to continue his exploration. If the content offers no links, he explores the site's navigation. The problem with the navigation area is that it usually has many links, many of which are unrelated to the topic in which the user is interested. This slows down the user's browsing process and wastes precious seconds. If it takes too long to find content of further interest (even if there's plenty of it, but it's hard to get to it), users hit the back button and webmasters see a nasty 60% + bounce rate.
On the other hand, if you use the content area as the PRIMARY navigation, you can guide visitors to different content sections without any distractions to the overall flow. Check out seobook.com - it does a great job of using content as the navigation area. Notice how many links there are within content.
Of course this works for search engine spiders as well, because spiders love keyword-rich content links.
Text Formatting
The question is not whether visitors read web pages or scan pages, but how little do they actually read and how much do they actually scan. Jakob Neilsen has a great article titled "How Little Do Users Read?" In summary he states:
"On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely."
To increase the chances of users reading your pages, use 2 - 4 sentences per paragraph, bullets and headlines. Text formatting has little effect on search engines, but it helps readers. Look at the way this article is formatted; it's very easy to scan.
JavaScript
Search engines have gotten better at JavaScript, especially Google, but to be on the safe side, avoid using it too much. Many JavaScript perks can be achieved with CSS. If you are going to use JavaScript, put it into a separate file to minimize page load time.
Web Design Consistency
Visitors expect to see things in the same places. If you switch things often, they'll get confused and look upon the site negatively. Search engines see websites as code, so design consistency is not an issue with bots.
Next: Make Finding Stuff Easy >>
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