SEM/SEO

When SEO Meets User Experience

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  • June 9, 2009

SEO gets a lot of talk and attention these days. Everyone seems to understand the importance of high search engine rankings, everyone seems to be optimizing their sites or investing into SEO services and SEO software. And there’s no denying that SEO is crucial for any business big or small that wants to succeed online. However this laser focus on search engine optimization often makes webmasters and business owners forget about one critical thing – user experience.

User experience is the second set of wheels that spin a website to success. If you only do SEO you’re driving a two-wheeled car which won’t take you far. But as soon as you start thinking about the ways to optimize your website for human visitors not just search engine bots you’ll find out that SEO and UE (user experience) go well together. Here are some tips you can take away and apply to your website to make it more search engine and user friendly.

Use Short Logical URLs

There are a number of reasons why logical (and preferably short) URLs are better then extremely long ones with multiple parameters. An URL that reads logical and conveys a meaning like www.somesite.com/sport-cars.html is a) more likely to rank for the keywords contained in it b) is more likely to be clicked because users understand what the page they will be taken to is about c) is more likely to be linked to. Now compare it to something as awkward as this: www.somesite.com/index.php?u_id=321&sid=3ec32444 5356hdfgssdfg45 would you click or share such link?

Revise the URLs on your website and see how you can improve them.

Keyword-Driven Navigation

We seem to understand the importance of keyword research perfectly well. We target the right keywords that speak the language of the searchers because they won’t find our website otherwise. Yet as soon as the visitor gets on our website he’s supposed to guess what exactly we mean by the names of our categories and site sections.

It’s a much better idea to stick with the logic we use when picking the keywords and use the same names for all the navigation on the site. First, because this way the users will easily find the info they are looking for, second, because this will give us an extra boost in the search results.

Fix Broken Links

No one likes broken links: your visitors don’t like them, search engine spiders don’t like them and I’m pretty much sure you don’t like them too. Have you checked your site for broken links yet? Then it’s high time you did.

Create Sitemaps

Having a sitemap of your site that you can feed to the search engine crawlers to make sure all of your web pages will get indexed is an important task on every SEO’s checklist. But it’s an even better idea to create two sitemaps: one for the search engine bots and one for your visitors. There sure are pages you want to show your visitors and hide from search engine bots and vice versa.

Customize 404 Error Pages

Whenever your users get redirected to a non-existent page they get a 404 Page Not Found Message. You can customize this page to add some navigational links that will take the users to the pages they seek or will help them return to a relevant section of your website.

These simple tips will help you add some points to the user experience and SEO rating of your site. Try to plan your all your SEO activities with the same approach keeping your users in mind and seeking ways to improve their experience on your website.

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