The Usability of Website and Search Engine Optimization

My focus is on how website usability goes hand in hand with good SEO. Usability science, or human factors, pursues the quest for human-computer interface designs that are easy to use. While Usability Day is about technology as a whole, and how that technology makes our lives easier, this article will turn its attention to website usability, and how it can be important in search engine optimization.

Website usability deals with ease of navigation, how colors work together to enhance a user experience without hurting the eyes, the size of fonts, and design. But some of the concepts of website usability have a direct effect on how search engines crawl your website, and index it accordingly.

“Memory is part of usability. That’s why navigation is such a pain in the neck to work out and make usable for everybody who will use your web site. There are ads, images, blinking thingy’s distracting your eyes, and your mind is going everywhere at once”.

Usability Testing

Web site usability focuses on what happens after users arrive on a Web site. When usability professionals perform formative tests on Web page prototypes, the initial assumption is users have already landed on a specific page. Usability professionals observe what people do once they arrive on that page. Do they take the desired call to action? Do they understand what page they’re viewing? The focus of formative usability testing is to create a user-friendly interface. It isn’t how to encourage people to visit your Web site. That responsibility is usually relegated to the marketing department.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. The term SEO also refers to “search engine optimizers,” an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients’ sites.

It is the process of analyzing and optimizing your web site’s design in order to ensure its indexing and increase its positioning in search engines.

The goal of this analysis and optimization is to make your web site and its content more attractive, relevant and visible to search engines and web searchers.

It would be terrible to have a beautifully designed web site with excellent written content, yet receive little traffic simply because your site cannot be easily found, if at all, by using a major search engine.

We will provide you with our expert advice on your site’s architecture in order to make it search engine friendly.

A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don’t realise is that by optimising their site for the search engines, if done correctly, they can also optimise it for their site visitors.

Ultimately this means more people finding your website and increased sales and lead generation. But are search engine optimization and usability compatible? Aren’t there trades-offs that need to be made between giving search engines what they want and giving people what they want? Read on and find out.
This Earth-Day-style event, focused on easy-to-use technology, currently involves plans in more than 70 cities in 30 countries. Online headquarters of the international day, says, “World Usability Day promotes the value of usability engineering, user-centered design, and every user’s responsibility to ask for things that work better. The Usability Professionals’ Association is doing that by encouraging, organizing, and sponsoring 36 hours of activities at the local level around the globe.

What Is Usability Testing?

Usability Testing is a term used to describe the methodology employed to evaluate a website, or screen-based product, with its intended users. The testing measures how ‘usable’ or ‘intuitive’ a product is and how easy it is to reach their goals.

The key difference between usability testing and traditional testing (bug testing, break testing etc.) is that usability testing takes place with actual users or customers of the product. Whilst traditional testing might be undertaken by a developer, designer or project manager, usability testing removes any bias by collecting feedback direct from the end user.

There are a few types of usability testing: Read more

Usability Testing

Usability Testing is a term used to describe the methodology employed to evaluate a website, or screen-based product, with its intended users. The testing measures how “usable” or “intuitive” a website is and how easy it is for a visitor to reach the website’s goal (capture a lead, sell a product, etc).

The key difference between usability testing and traditional testing (bug testing, break testing etc.) is that usability testing takes place with actual users or customers of the product. Whilst traditional testing might be undertaken by a developer, designer or project manager, usability testing removes any bias by collecting feedback direct from the end user.
There are a few types of usability testing: Read more

Hits vs. Visitors : Website Traffic Monitoring

Has your business ever been approached to advertise on a website? Were you offered a claim that said something like “Our website gets “60,000 hits per month?”  If so, I suggest being suspicious of that sales pitch.

A “HIT” is not the same as a “Visitor.”  A hit is counted when an individual element of a webpage is accessed. A popular news web page that has many graphics, news feeds, pictures and other elements might have 75 elements on it. One visitor coming to this page would then count as 75 hits.

You may find that a claim of 60,000 hits may equate to only 16 visitors per day on that website. It can equate to any number of visitor counts, depending on each web page and its content and construction, but you get the idea.

What is a Hit?

A web page is typically made up of a number of individual elements. An element is a photo, a graphic, a javascript, a css stylesheet, etc. When a web page is viewed, each of these elements is requested by the web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc) from the web server, and each file request increases the hit-count for the website.

A “Hit” is counted each time one of these individual elements are accessed. Read more

Remembering the Basics

Today at work I was working on making an existing blog into a custom looking blog. One of the things that I had to do with the blog was get it so that the images and sizes were the same and I figured that it would be a very easy thing to do. I dove into the blog’s code and started pulling things around, changing images, playing with the CSS and even tampering with the PHP code. Every time I did something I would test it out to make sure I didn’t make any major mistakes and everything was going well, that is until I got to the Logo at the top of the screen. Read more