SEO Training

It can seem like an impossible choice. SEO or Usability. Where is the compromise?

SEO is vital to the success of any website.  After all, if you can’t get found, then you can’t give your message.  However, once you have been found, it would be nice if people actually stayed on your site and read some of your content instead of clicking off somewhere else within seconds.  Content writing skills are extremely important.

Why are SEO and User Experience often opposites?

It all comes down to how the human mind works and how algorithms work.  Take pictures for example.  Google can’t “see” your graphics in the same way as humans do.

Despite huge improvements in search algorithms, the bottom line is that they still place a massive emphasis on original text content.

This contradicts what humans like to read.  We are the exact opposite.  We don’t really like reading online.  We like pictures and lots of them.

Heuristics – what have they ever done for us?

Jakob Nielsen is regarded by most as the father of usability heuristics (heuristics simply means that the rules are only loosely defined rather than strict).  It is worth reading through them.  What usability heuristics do is give us a rough template on how to not annoy users of both applications and websites (websites being a type of application really).

Keep Visitors Longer

By sticking to heuristic principles we have more chance of keeping our visitors for longer on our site, and of giving them an experience that in all probability they don’t particularly notice.  Not getting noticed in this case is a good thing.  We have all been frustrated on websites by not being able to simply navigate to where we want to go.  Mostly we just look for a new site when that happens.  This is the converse of heuristic principles.

This eye tracking study shows how we tend to read in a vaguely f shaped pattern online. This shows the importance of top google ranking too by the way.

How humans read web pages

We, as humans, read web pages quite differently to how we would read a book.  Broadly speaking, we scan down the left hand side of a web page, reading headings and only some of the words in the paragraphs below them.  How much depends on the level of interest the headline and the first few words invoked.

Thus, the way I wrote that last paragraph was not ideal from a heuristics point of view, since I essentially repeated the heading in my first line.  However that was ideal from an SEO perspective.  I train people to write like that.

Humans like short and snappy text, preferably backed up with pictures.  Google likes text, text and more text.  This is why content writing is such an artform.

How to please both humans and search engines with your content

I was recently working on a site relaunch for a recruitment agency specialising in Medical Jobs.  The website ranked really well for their chosen keywords within a very competitive niche market (no prizes for guessing who does their SEO!). However, the front page had a LOT of text on it that 99% of visitors would never read.

For the relaunch user experience was high on the list of priorities.  But we were faced with a problem.  A good user experience and lots of text on the front page do not good bedfellows make.

The solution was to turn to javascript and make the front page into a slideshow.  Not any javascript will do, and Ajax will not do at all.  The key to this is to make sure that when you view the source of your page, all the content is visible.  This means that search engines get to read all of your text.

Users get movement and interaction (which are plusses) while having the information broken down in such a way that they are more likely to read more of that text.

Did making a slideshow help keep visitors?

Yes it did.  Putting the information into a slideshow increased the average time on the front page of the site by 16 seconds straight away.  This means that people are actually staying to read the information, which is what you want if you have a website.

Benefits of Heuristics to SEO

Google take things like bounce rate and time on site into consideration for SEO too.  So, by providing a better user experience and keeping visitors longer through the use of heuristic principles, you are also improving your standing with the search engines.

How do I know if I should break up text on my page?

It is not always the case that text needs to be broken up for humans to appreciate it properly.  It is very simple to find out if your page needs help.  Use your analytics.  The key factor here is the amount of time spent on the page.  If it is really low on a page that has a lot of text then it stands to reason that your users are not reading it.  If that doesn’t upset you it should.  The only reason it would not upset you is if the content is really only there for the search engines.  In other words it’s spam content.  There should be nothing on your website that you do not want people to read.  Spam content can be recognised by search engines simply by measuring the time your visitors spend on your page.  If it’s too short for the amount of content, then the quality of the writing must be really bad. Thus at the very least, the page does not deserve to be ranked highly.

I don’t like slideshows (other ways to break up text)

If you have a lot of text on your page that you realise could not possibly be read in the time your analytics say people are taking to read it then you need to make some changes.  The following are ways of breaking up text in a page to make it more accessible…

• Lists.  Put your content into lists.  They are easier to read than straight paragraphs.
• Plenty of headings.  These hugely increase the chances of people reading more of your content.
• Boxes.  Place your content into bite sized individual boxes.
• Pictures. Pictures and picture captions are about the only thing that will distract us from reading down the left hand side of a page at the speed of light.  We love images.  However, stock images that we have seen before tend to be ignored.  Your pictures have to get attention too.
• Ruthless editing.  Big long sentences are bad.  Get rid of your verbose ramblings and stick to the point. (I could do with remembering that one).
• Highlight text. Using bold or italic text helps to get pertinent points noticed.

As always, remember that keyword stuffing is really annoying to users.  I don’t want to read about seo training in the latest seo training article on this seo training website.  Neither do search engines.  It may work to some extent, but it’s effect on users is to make you look bad, so don’t do it!

Use internal links to chain your site together and make it work as one unit

One of the things I forgot to mention when I was talking about on-page SEO was internal linking.  This was very remiss of me so I thought I should cover it immediately.

Internal linking is the practice of creating links in your text that point to other pages on your site.  It is a part of SEO training that is often not covered.

Why use internal links?  After all you have a navigation menu so what use are more links to the same pages?  Navigation does not generally allow you use the keywords you would like a page to be found for.  The “home” navigation item is a prime example.  You could forgo the word “home” and put in something that relates to the actual page, but that would be at odds with good heuristics (ease of use) for your user.  Visitors to a website expect to see a home page.  So we need to give it to them.  The trouble is that the word “home” does nothing as far telling a search engine what the page is about (unless you have a property site perhaps).  The same is true with all your navigation links.  They do not give an ideal idea of what the page is about.  They are usually only one or two words long for a start.

With internal linking in your body text, because you control the website, you have total control over what text goes into those links.  Let’s look at it from a search engines point of view.  They look at links, the text in the links and the relevance of the page the link points to.  They assume that the text in the link is representative of the page you are pointing to (otherwise it’s a pointless link).  If you have descriptive text in a link, it tells the search engine a bit more about the page than it could gain from simply crawling the page itself.  You are telling the search engines that the keyword(s) you use in your link are important for that page.  The search engines take that information, and when somebody else types those same keywords into the search engine, the search engine goes, “oh, I know, This page here is about that”, simply because it has been told it is by the link text.  Link text is a prime SEO factor.

That over simplifies it a bit, but it’s all you really need to know about it for now.

How to use internal links.  Like with all areas in SEO, moderation is king.  But I thought it was content that was king I hear you say.  Well yes, but Moderation in SEO efforts is vital.  Otherwise you are stuffing.

Here is a wonderful benefit of using internal link text.  You get the benefit of the words twice.  Say, for example you have a front (home) page on your site (which doubtless you do).  On that page you want to inform visitors about the whole sites’ contents.  To do this you write text that talks about all the things you have going on in the site.  Within that text will be keywords that you want to be found for, and those keywords will relate to other pages on the site.  Make a link out of them and point them to the other pages.

By creating a link in text you are saying to both users and search engines that they can find more information on the subject of the linked text by clicking on it.  The keyword is on the page and at the same time you are pointing out that another page on your site is also related to that keyword.  Sweet.

Blogging is a prime example of where this technique is used well.  I don’t do enough of it.  I sometimes write these posts just to remind myself of what I should be doing.  Take a look at copyblogger though.  Not only do they have a fair few internal links, but they also do a great job of teaching you about writing internet copy (that’s text to you and me).  They also write nice short posts in general, something I should learn from.

A word of caution.

I have seen this done to excess.  Try not to make your pages a horrendous looking sea of links.  Remember that guidelines say that you should have less than 100 links per page.  That includes all your navigation by the way.

Also, I should point out that including several links to the same page within your text is regarded by some (myself included) as a waste of time.  There is some evidence that if you use two different keywords to link to the same page, the first keyword will be given preference and the second will be ignored.  Somebody actually set up an experiment to test it and it would seem to be the case on Google.

Make sure the keywords you use in your link are relevant to both the page you link to and the surrounding text on the page you are linking from.  This is important.

I should have given you the short version of this post really:-

Create internal links with relevant keywords and don’t overdo it!  It will do you wonders.