Submitted on:  04/18/2007

SEO, as we know, is the science of making sites the best they can be for the search engines. Usability is all about making sites the best they can be for human visitors. Consequently, to make sites the best they can be for both types of visitors, we need to combine usability and SEO and work out a set of rules that works in both cases. Following these rules will take us in the right direction from both the usability and the SEO point of view. Neglecting them will hurt both users' experiences and the search engine success of our websites.

Working out this set of rules is not as hard as it may seem. The engines were designed with their users in mind, so they would bring the best - from the human point of view - websites to the top. That's why they tend to see quality where a human being would also see it, and thus SEO and usability often turn out to be the same thing.

Navigation

The most important aspect of the usability of a website is navigation, which is how the pages within the site are linked to each other to provide paths to users browsing it.

Even if we leave the "information foraging theory" aside for a while and concentrate on basic usability, it's still quite obvious that navigation does need to be as user-friendly as possible.

The fewer the clicks it takes to find a page, the more the chances there are that users will find and read it. Having sitemaps and breadcrumbs are a good way to make sure nobody gets lost while surfing; the most important pages should be just one click away from the home page and featured most prominently (preferably from the main menu bar).

So what does this have to do with SEO?

As we know, the navigation links are followed by the search engine spiders, ensuring deep crawling of the site (as most of the incoming links from the outside usually point to the home page). The shallow navigation increases the chances of the website being completely indexed (though after the latest BigDaddy Google update, complete indexing is a rare case, but this can change over time). Sitemaps and breadcrumbs help indexing, as well; besides, they offer us an excellent opportunity to include our important keywords in the link text, which is one of the most important SEO factors.

Links from within the context of the page copy play their role in both usability and SEO, too. Both usability and SEO dictate we don't use "click here" as the anchor text for such links, but link descriptive words (often the same as targeted keywords, e.g. the name of the product) to the corresponding page instead.

Example: "See more of our digital cameras" rather than "Click here to see more of our digital cameras".

Headings

The <h1> - <h6> tags used to mark headings/subheadings within the text of a page are a huge usability factor. Without them, long and even medium-sized content pages (e.g. articles) would never be read further than the second paragraph. The sub-headings increase scanability of a page and at the same time work like "teasers", impelling the readers to proceed to the end.

To work successfully, the headings should give general information about what sort of material the next portion of the text contains; at the same time they should "ask questions", not contain the answers, in order to keep the reader intrigued and interested.

In order to be specific and play their role well, they often need to have keywords in them; here we have yet another case of an SEO improvement derived naturally from improved usability.

More examples of how SEO and Usability integrate

There are a lot of other factors that work fine to achieve both goals. These include, but are not limited to, meaningful page URLs, title tags, avoidance of frames and JavaScript-based navigation (some users prefer to browse the Net with scripts turned off and need static HTML-based navigation for that purpose), fast loading pages and valid, cross-browser compatible code. Some of the implications are explained in detail in The secret benefit of search engine optimisation: Increased usability, an article by Trenton Moss, which is a must-read.

The spiders are picky...

The search engines of today are not the same as they used to be, and are much harder to please. There are more and more facts proving (even if indirectly) that Google's ranking of pages in the SERPs now involves sophisticated semantic analysis of the content, which leaves us with no other options but to write well. The engines also look at the overall site structure, HTML code, linking patterns and other factors that, when taken together, define quality, but make the task of pleasing the spiders much harder to achieve.

Quick SEO success is becoming a thing of the past; long-term expectations and careful planning is today's SEO reality. The overall website optimisation (as opposed to just search engine optimisation) is now the only path to online success, and it most definitely includes usability, which explains why the most far-sighted SEO companies are shifting towards usability research.

... but humans are pickier

If the task of getting websites to the top of the SERPs has become a very tricky one these days, it doesn't look hard when compared to the task of making a website perfect from a human's point of view.

Jakob Nielsen, in the above-mentioned article on Information Foraging, describes how patterns of Net users' behaviour has changed over time, pointing out that "the better search engines get at highlighting quality sites, the less time users will spend on any one site". In other words, the greater the number of sites that are properly optimised for the engines, the more effort you will need to put into the usability factor to maintain competitiveness with others for your visitors' affection.

Advanced research that is currently being carried out on web usability is continuously leading to higher standards. To be successful on the web, you need to know all about such things as "information scent trails", various types of online behaviour in conjunction with the different types of websites (what works for an e-shop, doesn't work for a hobby blog or an online library), read numerous reports on the latest usability research (often conflicting with each other), and improve, improve, improve your website continuously. The good news though is that "information scent trails" also work fine for SEO purposes, as they are nothing but navigation links with keyword-rich anchor text. But overall, usability involves a lot more consideration than does SEO.

Search engine marketing, as mentioned in some of my previous articles, is impossible without usability and includes it as one of the disciplines. Sites that are bad from the usability point of view show very low ROI, which means no matter how highly they rank in the engines, they will never be really successful and profitable. That is why I'm planning on writing more usability-related articles.

Wait for more good stuff to come.

About the Author:

Name:  Irina Ponomareva Irina Ponomareva has been a practising SEO consultant since 2004. She joined Viscomp, a Russian web design agency, in February 2008. Find out more at http://www.viscomp-dev.com/