User
Interface - Optimization
How does
a customer find your content? How does a search engine
find your site?
- Clear menus
- Focused content
- Logical organization
- Links to relevant material.
- Active testing and feedback
- Use Metas
- Clean code
Make your menus stand out
- People don't like to read. If they arrive at your
site with a topic in mind, they want clearly defined
signposts to jump out at them. Unless you want to
develop a wiki interface, don't scatter your important
links in a block of text. Don't bury primary links
on a back page. Back up javascript with hard coded
links.
Focus your ideas
- Group your concepts, with obvious links to the subtopics.
If you are constructing a home page with multiple
topics, leave enough white space between the separate
areas of content to define what is being grouped.
Prioritize your content
- Keep main topics one click down. Limit sub topics
to no more than 3 links deep, avoid circular menus
with multiple pages chained together by
links that only go one page forward or one step back. Provide an easy way to return
to the home page. Don't turn the site exploration
into a treasure hunt.
Provide resources
and back-up to your assertions. If customers decide
the material is interesting, they may want to know
more in depth.
Arrange for active testing
of your pages. You may think the information on your
page is clearly stated, but does the customer see
it? When they arrived at your site, is your information
what they were trying to find?
Help search engines determine
your page relevancy to a search criteria.
- Provide keywords and description
metas - think of common synonyms and related concepts
rather than repeating the same key word multiple
times, anticipate common spelling errors in search
criteria
- Make keywords, descriptions and
page titles reflect page content.
- Place site content lead-ins on
the index page, Mission statements do not belong
on the index page.
- Because the volume of unique
visitors and inbound outside links count heaviliy
in your site's relevancy profile, look for ways
to offer content other sites might find useful.
- Make sure that your reciprocal
links have original content with a valid relationship
to your own. Don't allow an "optimizer"
to submit your site to junk indexes. Vast collections
of links that have no particular relationship to
your site are just a form of spam.
In general, don't use frame
pages - Frames are a single page (a) subdivided
into two or more sections that call other pages. The
menu exists in one section (b) and rotates content
into one of the other subdivided sections (c).
Search engines record the link of the first page (a),
but the details of subsequent content just become
part of the frame page, depriving search engines of
the links to pages rotated into the "content" (c) part of the frame. In instances where you
wish to obscure the path to a page, a frame may make
content more difficult to find.
Don't use html filled with
propriatory tags - The pages load poorly
and may cause display problems.
Don't use images as text
- Search engines can't read "text" buried
in images, so any content other than the title is
lost. Google can translate PDFs into an html format,
but visitors to your site may not bother, even if
they have Adobe reader. Any extra steps to retrieve
content discourages customers.
If you use Flash make sure
your site requires it. - Most Flash renders
text in an image format. If the Flash movie incorporates
music, or heavy graphics it is slow to download over
dial-up. It requires a specific program (flash plug-in)
to read the file. While it is possible to test whether
a visitor can read flash, detecting which of the multiple
versions they can read is not assured and backward
compatibilty is poor. Some search engines frankly
state they avoid sites heavy in flash, and refuse
to index them.
|
