Website Usability and Search Engine Traffic

How To Design Usability Specific To Visitors From Search Engines

In my last post we talked about search engines and how Google is getting into the portal marketplace. Today I am going to go into detail about how people are using search engines, and how their user patterns have changed over the last couple of years. You might wonder how users search can effect your site usability, but believe it!

The fact is more and more users are turning to search engines for direct answers, not for links to websites. Furthermore as we delve into online behavior it is clear that search engine users are NOT looking for sites to explore and use in depth, but looking directly for an answer to a problem, or a product or service. Sites like Google and Yahoo have extensive e-commerce and shopping features built in, that means that more and more users are dealing direct with the search engines and not the website!

Taking these facts into consideration makes it even more important to get your messages across as clear and as fast as you can. The primary way to accomplish this is by controlling what the search engines say about your site in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). The title and description are the primary means for identifying your site and what it is about. Read my article about Meta Tags for detailed instructions.

The meta title is the most important aspect of your pages. When a user does a search they will scan the SERPS for what they are looking for and more time than not they are looking at the titles. Here is the catch; the search engines themselves use the title to determine what your page is about and how relevant the page is. How many inbound links there are to that page with the keywords that are in the anchor text and how they relate to the meta title and the keyword density of the page is part of the algorithm that determine placement within the SERPS.

Walking the thin line between giving a human what they need to see to click on your site and giving the search engines what they need to place your site is the real challenge. It is important to find a combination that appeases both. When looking at your keywords it is important to isolate you most important keyword phrase and THAT needs to be the beginning of your title!