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.

Make Money Online Guide – The Best Place To Place Affiliate Links On Your Website

Where you place your affiliate links on your website can really make a difference on how many clicks you end up getting and, since every click means a potential sale, this is an important aspect of internet marketing.

Research has shown that the most effective affiliate links are text links. Yes, plain text links. Not big flashy banner ads like most affiliate website are filled to the brim with. What happens is, you write a great article (or have one created) about the product or something related to the product and stick the link into your text. This allows interested readers to see the link as they are reading and click on it.

Of course, your article and your link have to work effectively together to make this happen. A bad article and an unrelated link to an unknown product are not likely to make the profits roll in.

So the next time you are out to choose an affiliate link, try placing a relevant link in a great article that is well optimized for search engines and see how it works out for you.

Keyword density and placement are important parts of optimizing your articles for search engines. Search engine spiders scan a page in a way that makes it important to place your keywords where they will be detected and recognized as a keyword, so that your article will come up when someone searches for that keyword.

What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a word that is going to be placed in your article several times, not just once as that would make every word a keyword. When a spider sees that you have a word placed several times in an article, it will determine that your page may be useful to users that search for such a keyword.

Over Optimizing Your Articles

It is important to note that there is also such a thing as over optimizing your articles for particular words, this is known as “keyword stuffing”. When you stuff keywords in an article a spider will detect that you are trying to trick it into placing your article high in the search engine results for that word, and will instead penalize your site and your page for doing such. This may even affect the rankings of your other pages or get your site blacklisted from a particular search engine if you are found keyword stuffing too many times.

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is how many times your keyword is placed in your article. Most use a percentage to determine how many times they will put a keyword in an article. For instance, if you have a 500 word article and want to achieve a keyword density of 5%, then you will need to have the keyword in your article exactly 25 times. You can find hundreds of resources and guides recommending one keyword density over another and the reasons behind the logic, however, in the end you will have to determine which density is more profitable for your articles. Each webmaster as their own density that they like to achieve based on past results. As long as you don’t over optimize and you are making sufficient profit from your rankings, then you can choose whatever keyword density you like.

The Right Density

No matter what exact density you choose, it is important to place keywords so that there are more at the beginning and end to produce an hour glass effect. Having the right keyword density in your article makes it more likely that you will make money off of that article because it will rise in the search engine results and be seen by more people.

Power That an Ecommerce Website Can Bring

eCommerce internet solution is proving its significance in the world of business for the last few years. It has become equally beneficial for entities involved, customers as well as companies who are providing ecommerce solutions. The ratio of providing satisfaction to customers by ecommerce solution providers in the business world is measured unequal or it varies due to many factors. Read more

Website Marketing for Local Business and Local Search

“My website has been online for six months, but I can’t find my site in Google!“

As a website and internet marketing professional, I hear this often.  Most of the time, when I speak to small business owners about their existing website, I hear stories about how that website  does not get the traffic that they were expecting.  The small business sector (those businesses who have less than 10 employees and that serve a local market) are becoming more sophisticated, and realize that they need a website as part of their every day marketing efforts.  However, too many of these business owners do not know how to get their website to rank in search engines.

There is a difference in strategy when marketing a website that serves a local market (i.e. restaurant, local contractor, a hotel, etc) than there is marketing a site that targets a National audience (i.e. online retail).  The basic strategies are the same. But the difference is that there are a number of things that a website owner can do FOR THEMSELVES that will greatly help the search engine rankings.

This article  is written for the small business owner with a website. Listed are some items that can really help a website gain ranking, and are things that can be done without a webmaster’s help. All it takes is some time and patience. These are things that our company, AIM – Arizona Internet Marketing, does as part of a larger search engine marketing effort on many websites. Read more