For those of you who haven't read Steve Krug's most excellent book on web usability, I strongly recommend it. It is a "common sense approach" most definitely. But for the small business owner, one must weigh usability against a search engine's ability to find you. In the search engine kingdom, content is king.

Web usability takes the approach of minimizing the choices for the visitor while ensuring that the choices make sense to the visitor. Assume for a moment that a visitor has never been to your site before. You have only 4 seconds to make and impression and thus keep the visitor at your site. As Krug points out in his book, people don't read web pages, but rather scan them, and very quickly I might add, to see if they can quickly find out if you can solve their problem. I attempt to illustrate this in the screen shots of the Websites That Work website. Notice the image on the right gets more blurry the further right and further down the page (see also "Users are Blind, So Website Designers Must Be Guide Dogs" for an even better illustration).

What Your Site Actually Looks Like

What Visitors "Read" When They Get There

The opposite is true for search engine "bots" (short for "robot"). For instance, the googlebot reads through each word on each page (at least the first 100k of content), notices where each word is on the page (higher is better), notices bolded text, link text, headings, etc. and then the Google "alogrithm" automagically ranks that page based on keywords and phrases it finds on those pages. So it makes sense that having more content is better for search engines. 

So begs the question, "Do I author for usability of should I make my site more visible for search engines by having good, solid content on each page?"

My answer is, "Both." Both are extremely important. You must attract visitors to your site and you also must keep them there once they arrive. This is the one aspect that I see missed on so many sites. They either author for usability or SEO, but not both.

So how do you both please the end user with usability and also make your site more "findable" by search engines? You can do so through by maintaining usability aspects as defined in Steve Krug's book and practicing pragmatic SEO practices. Page titles, link popularity, etc. I am a firm believer that given all things equal between multiple sites, the one that has the better page "title" based on keywords will win out every time. There are also things you can do with dynamic pages (such as Active Server Pages) that can keep the viewable page size down and thus "usable", but also allow you to include more content for the search engines.

Another great way to make your site more "findable" is to start a blog related to your business. You can brand it to look like your website, and link back to your site, but this is the perfect way to continually "add content" to your site. If people start to read your blog and see that you, in fact, know what you are talking about, this will help sway them to utilize your products or services. This is also an easy way to keep your site current with new developments related to your specific vertical. It is important to note that your blog should have really helpful information in it. The worst thing you can do is to use it only as a "markety" type of site that only tells people how good you are. Instead, show them how good you are by supplying rich, helpful content.

I mentioned earlier in this post that "content is king" when it comes to good, organic search engine optimization. I can't fully agree with that. "Good" Content is King. So doing your homework and knowing what keywords and phrases are a good match for what you do (products, services, etc.) and also match up welll with what the competition is using is key to a successful SEO/SEM plan.

There are also SEO "secrets" that I use that have had excellent results for my customers. Of course, I won't divulge those secrets in this blog. I must mention that these "secrets" are ethical as I do not believe in nor practice what I call "unethical SEO", but rather a pragmatic approach that produces results. And don't forget about VSEO (video search engine optimization), a chance you should jump on and take advantage of. Read my quick article about Video SEO to learn more.

If you would like more information about how you can maximize your website for usability and content, please contact Websites That Work today.