Website Usability and SEO - Directory and Font Considerations
Directories and Levels
A colleague, Mike Shapiro, who I consider to be a friend, once told me, “Remember
the average clicker spends 7 seconds deciding whether to stick around.” Statistics show that web users like to visit sites that have what they need not more than a couple of clicks away from the home page or landing page. If a web user has to go through a dozen links in order to get to what they are looking for, they will very likely give up in frustration, and then move on to the next site offering what they need.
In the same way, many search engine bots don’t crawl more than a couple directory levels deep. If the meat and potatoes of your site is deep within the site structure, you can count on those pages not being crawled or indexed quickly, if at all. Even if you have a great navigation structure and breadcrumbs in place, it is very hard on a search engine server’s resources to have to crawl deeply into a website’s structure.
Fonts and Headings
Font size and color – Using tiny text isn’t easy for web visitors to read, and if they have to struggle to read your content, there is probably a good chance that they won’t even try. Further, many search engines give more weight to text that is bigger than text that is small. It’s also important to a web visitor that they can read the text without having to strain their eyes due to the color of the font or the background.
It’s difficult also for your web visitor to read flashing, scrolling, or blinking text. Search engines tend to disregard these things as well, so avoiding this type of font behavior is usually best.
Headings – The World Wide Web Consortium recommends using heading tags to structure an HTML document. <H1> through <H6> gives natural stopping and starting points in a web page, but also alerts a visitor to the various sections of the page. Many search engines do take these headings into account as being important in the context of the page. However, this has been abused in the past, and I don’t believe search engines give headings as much weight as they used to. Still, organizing your pages into sections is a good idea for both structural, navigational, and organization purposes, both for the site visitor and the search engines.
