Top Usability (and Search Engine) tips

Are you disappointed by your site's performance in search engines? There are many search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, some more valid than others, and some more likely to harm than hurt you.

Fortunately, it turns out that many of the best techniques for getting noticed by search engines are very similar to common-sense usability guidelines. Here are several techniques you can use to make your site better for your users—and for the search engines.

Use H1, H2, and H3 Headings

When you learned HTML, chances are one of the first tags you tried was a simple H1 heading. The heading tags, ranging from H1 to H6, are designed to mark content that is more important than a simple paragraph—headings and titles.

The various header tags result in large, bold fonts that should be more visible to users. While you can do the same thing with tags like <b> and <font>, search engines use header tags to find important parts of the page. So use the standard tags. If you are unhappy with the way they appear, use CSS to control their appearance rather than resorting to a non-standard approach.

Keep your keywords in mind while you set up headings. These are the words users will be typing into search engines in the hope of finding sites like yours. For maximum search engine visibility, make sure these words appear in your headings.

Choose Informative Page Titles

The <title> tag is another standard way to define the title of a page—while you may be tempted to use it to display an "in" joke or slogan, using a sensible title with the relevant keywords is the best strategy for search engines. It also helps users when they bookmark your site.

The page's title is particularly important since your page is likely to be listed with this title in the search results. Make sure the name of your site, and any relevant keywords, appear in the title. Don't forget that different pages of your site may need different titles to describe what they contain, although it is a good practice to include your site's name in each one.

Examples

Condiment Central 

• BAD: Too plain. Get some keywords in there.

Condiment Central: Great service and lowest prices!

• BAD: Wrong keywords. Your customers aren't searching for generic terms like 'service' and 'prices'.

Condiment Central: Buy mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard online

• GOOD: For the home page, include the most important keywords, and let the user know the purpose of your site.

Condiment Central: Spicy Mustard and Salsa

• GOOD: For a specific section, use its specific keywords.

Create Meaningful Links

Links are vital for users to navigate your site, and the content of your links helps search engines determine how to categorize pages. Follow these guidelines for links:

• Create a clear navigation system so that users and search engines can find all of your content. For a larger site, a site map that lists all of the pages is useful.
• Instead of using generic anchor text like "click here", use links that name their destination and use relevant keywords.
• Add the TITLE attribute to your <A> tags that define links. This specifies an optional title for the link, and is displayed when the mouse is over the link in recent browsers.
• Use text links rather than graphical ones whenever possible. The text used in links provides vital clues to search engines about the content of your pages.
• Avoid using JavaScript-based navigation systems. Search engines are unable to parse them and determine the significance of your links.
• When external sites link to yours, encourage them to use your site's name or the appropriate keywords as link text.

Assign Readable URLs

The URL of each page of your site provides search engines - and users - with information about the page's content. Using clear, meaningful URLs will help your site in the search engines and make it look professional to the users:

• Choose a memorable domain name. You may not be able to find an available single-word domain name, but longer names may even be better since they may contain keywords used to index your site.
• Use short, descriptive filenames that appropriate keywords to describe the pages.
• If you use CGI or PHP to generate pages, be sure to keep filenames simple. While adding variables and session identifiers to URLs can simplify scripting, it can create long, ugly URLs that may cause search engines to spend less time scanning your site.

Don't Forget the Content

While this may seem obvious, make sure your page includes some text for the users (and search engines) to read. Even if a page is mostly graphical, be sure to include at least one descriptive paragraph about the content.

If you have a list of keywords your site is targeting, try to work them into the content of appropriate pages - but don't just make lists of keywords. If you write clear, readable content about your page's topic, you should find it natural to include the appropriate keywords.

Keep it Short and Simple

Search engines like short, simple pages. This doesn't mean you should limit the amount of text - but you should eliminate unneccessary HTML, JavaScript, and CSS baggage that can make it difficult for search engines to find the important part of your pages. Follow these tips to create pages that are ideally suited for search engine spiders - as a side effect, your pages will load quickly and will be less likely to cause browser errors for your visitors.

• Keep HTML tags to a minimum. After a page has been written and rewritten many times, you may find unneeded tags remain. Be sure to take a good look at your pages' source code from time to time.
• Use CSS (cascading style sheets) whenever possible to format text. This allows you to avoid unnecessary tags like <font> and <center>, and create a well-formatted page that requires less bandwidth.
• When you use CSS, keep style sheets in separate files whenever possible. This keeps the HTML pages short and to the point.
• Also keep JavaScript in external files when you can. Scripts aren't useful to search engines and can only distract them from your real content.
• Avoid using fancy WYSIWYG editors or word processors to create HTML pages - or if you do, take a look at the source code afterward and simplify it. Microsoft Word is a well-known source of megabytes of unnecessary HTML baggage.

Use Valid HTML

Speaking of HTML, search engines interpret this language in much the same way as a browser does - but unlike a browser, they weren't designed to work around errors in your HTML code. An HTML error could result in a page that looks fine in certain browsers, but loses all meaning to a search engine - or to those visitors using less-forgiving browsers.

To make sure an HTML error won't cause you trouble, you should validate your pages using one of the available HTML checkers. This will ensure that you're following the standards, and will also spot tag errors you might have missed. Here are two of the most useful online validators:

• The W3C HTML Validator can validate pages you have placed online, or you can upload a page for validation.
• The WDG HTML Validator provides friendly results and may catch errors missed by the W3C validator.

Don't forget to validate your CSS style sheets as well:

• W3C CSS Validator
• The WDG's CSSCheck

Conclusion

By creating sensible pages with good content, logical links and navigation, and meaningful titles and headings, you can improve your results in search engines. More importantly, you will keep visitors happy - the pages will load quickly and work on a variety of browsers, and navigating your site will be easy.