Website Usability and SEO
In this article, 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.
“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. Yet, when I tell a web site owner that people have trouble reading a page when there are 10 things happening all at once, they act as though I stole their blankie.” --Kimberly Krause Berg
I began writing this article in October, but ironically, I wanted to finish it on November 3rd, which is World Usability Day. I write my articles in a funny way, some might think. I write the end, then I write the middle, and lastly, I write the introduction. I didn’t know anything about World Usability Day until I ran across the concept on CNN’s Morning News program, which kicked off events in the US at Hour 21, by Elizabeth Rosenzweig, World Usability Day Chair.
“Why doesn't this work better? Why can't they make this easier? World Usability Day is for all the people who've ever asked questions like these. This Earth-Day-style event, focused on easy-to-use technology, currently involves plans in more than 70 cities in 30 countries. WorldUsabilityDay.org, 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, all occurring on November 3, 2005.” Events included surveys on how appropriate use of color greatly impacts user experience online, seminars and conferences locally, and Open Houses.
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.
