Website Usability and SEO - Content Positioning, Site Maps, and Stats
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Content Position
People generally read left to right and top to bottom. They tend to scan the first sections of the page before making a determination as to whether this page is what they are looking for or not. Similarly, a search engine scan the text in the same order: left to right, top to bottom. A search engine determines that the content at the top and left of the page is far more important than the content to the right and at the bottom of the page.
Marketing analysis shows that people tend to disregard content to the right of a page more so than they would if the content was on the left side. This has to do with the way we read. Google currently is reanalyzing its AdWords positioning, and testing other areas to put their ads for this very reason.
Sitemaps
There are two specific reasons for having a sitemap on your website. A good sitemap allows your users find what they are looking for and it helps the search engines better index your entire site. It’s always a good idea to group your site’s pages under topics or category. If you are selling products and services on your site, or have different sections in your site, like articles, news, products, and services, it might be a good idea to place them into different groups. If you find yourself in the position of having more than 50 links on a single page, break your sitemap into several pages, grouped by category.
Taking the time to design a good site map ensures people will easily find the page or section that interests them, which is a good usability technique. Also, make sure your site map is directly linked to your homepage, and that it is a text link. This last step is important, since one of the first things a search engine robot looks at when it arrives at a website is the site map link. In this step, you allow ease of use for your visitors, and ability for easy indexing for search engines, achieving website usability and SEO in one move.
Stats to Help with Usability
Your website statistics can help you identify where your visitors are going, or tend to go, and then you can streamline your site accordingly. If your visitors get hung up on a page that has no place else to go, then navigation path statistics can help you determine where those visitors are getting stuck. You can then alter your navigation of those pages to make it easy for your visitors to get back to where they want to be.
From a marketing view, it is important to see the path the visitor takes, and which series of events followed are the most effective. Frequent exit patterns will show your where your site is underperforming. Error statistics can also help you improve the usability and navigation of your website.
Conclusion
There is absolutely no reason at all that your design can’t cater to both visitors and search engines. There are many techniques and tools that you can utilize to make your website more accessible and search engine friendly, such as external style sheets, clean code, or easy navigation systems. Website usability can definitely go hand in hand with good SEO, and these things I’ve outlined for you today are not at all difficult to implement. Not only will these things make it easier for a visitor to want to keep coming back to your site, but they will also give search engine bots incentives to crawl your site more frequently, and index you accordingly.
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