Better Readability for Improving the Number of Site Viewers - Readability Rules and SEO

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Readability Rules and Their Effect on Ranking

For designers, readability rules are more marketing stuff. For marketers, this is all a technical matter. In a sense, it looks like readability is no one's land. And the truth is that they are neither a marketing bla-bla, nor ltra difficult technical stuff. Observing them in any case leads to greater user satisfaction.

Fonts and Colors

This category encompasses core readability rules, because fonts and colors are the main elements of a web page. Their proper use is vital for readability. Crawlers are more interested in text and hyperlinks, and are notably not concerned if your body is 6 points and pink with orange background, or the background is so strikingly bright or so deadly dark that your eyes start to cry. Of course, I'm exaggerating. While a spider may not like this eye straining site, I am saying it will not actually be penalized. In real life, the cases may not be this drastic, but a good SEO can help designers watch for these sorts of problems. It may not be as cut and dry as two colors that don't stand out from each other enough; it might be a background image that takes over the page content and drowns it out.

The Bigger, The Better

It is a known fact that headings have a weight in calculating relevancy. It is not only because they are enclosed in a <h> tags, but also because generally larger font sizes are used for headings. Words and sentences in larger font sizes (or in bold/italic) throughout the text are also more "visible" both to your readers and to search engine spiders. So, if you occasionally use larger font size to emphasize a word or two in the text, this is good both for readability (since the words stands out from the crowd) and for search engine ranking, provided you emphasise good phrases. But do not misuse this on too many words or use ifferent colors for emphasis; it looks ugly and gets annoying to read. You cannot be sure that search engines will pay attention to each one with all the other emphasised words on your pages.

Hiding in the Shadows

Guess what is worse than pink letters on orange background? Pink letters on pink background or orange letters on orange background. And not only that, using text font color that is the same (or similar) to the color of the background is an absolute "No-no" both for readability and for ranking. For readability it is clear; one will hardly be able to read invisible text or text that merges with the background.

While this looks like a symbol of ignorance and your readers will laught at you (at best), this is undoubtedly a search engine suicide. Why? Because one of the biggest crimes you can commit is to use hidden text. And when the font colors and the background color are the same (or very close to each other), you may soon notice how quickly search engines can ban your site.

Even if you hide your fonts in an external CSS, this is no use. Google and the other search engines might not index CSS files, but they still read them. And even if Google does not spot it, you can bet that your competitors will not miss it, and you will be reported to Google.

Next: Readability Rules Continued >>
 

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