SEO and Usability - True Love

For the last half year I’ve been doing search engine optimization (SEO) for mbl.is. During this time it has become more clear to me that SEO and usability have a lot in common.

Usability is all about helping users to find what they’re looking for and if they get lost tell them where they are and provide them with an easy way of browsing to another page.

You can look at search engine crawlers as primitive users going from page to page asking the same questions again and again: “where am I?”, “what is this page about?”, “what is the most important part of this page?”, “I’m not interested, can you show me to the next page?”. Basically the same questions a user who is lost is asking himself.

So what are the main factors in SEO and usabiliy?

Headings

The most obvious usability factor is telling the user where he is and what the page he is looking at is all about. The same goes by with search engine crawlers, they look for headings when determining how to index a page. A search engine crawler looks for heading tags (h1,h2,h3…) which is great for usability because web developers tend to use regular sized bold text as headings resulting in a layout with no visual hierarchy - total flatness.

Page description

A short text describing what you can find at a certain page and how to use it can be very helpful for users if they’re confused. I am not talking about meta description here but a text that’s visible to the user. The same text can of course and should be used for the meta description tag. Visible page description is also a good place to put keywords which don’t belong in the heading, title tag or url but you want to rank under in search engines. This sort of description can however easily get out of hand if it’s too long and should not be used if unnecessary - if the user interface is so simple it doesn’t need a description, don’t do one! It can look as ridiculous if Google would put a yellow box on it’s search engine saying “This is the Google search engine. If you would like to search, enter what you’re searching for in the input box and press the Google Search button”.

Title tags

Title tags are one of the main factors when search engines determine what the most important part of a certain page is. It is also a huge factor when it comes to usability. When bookmarking a page, the title tag is used for it’s name in the bookmarks. Do you love tabbed browsing? What is more annoying than having 10 tabs open with multiple pages from the same website and all of them have a title like “The Website”? Title tags should describe in few words what the page is about

Readable and information rich URLs

URLs are also one of the main factor when search engines determine what a page is about. So if you’re hoping to rank under a certain keyword, put your keyword in the URL and throw away symbols like ?=&. Simple readable URLs are also a lot easier to remember and enter so they play a big role in both SEO and usability.

I didn’t realize how super convenient readable and information rich URLs were until we started using them for news stories at mbl.is. The url for a news story is now constructed like this:

http://mbl.is/mm/frettir/innlent/2008/02/02/mbl_is_a_afmaeli_i_dag/

After the mm, which is there because of technical reasons (yeah I know - don’t ask), comes /news/category/year/month/day/headline/.

The URL tells you that the news story is filed under the category innlent (local news), it’s written in February 2nd, 2008 and is about mbl’s 10th anniversary. People are always posting links to you through through email, msn etc. and with a information rich URL like that you can quickly determine what the page is about and in this case when it was published before even clicking on the link!

Some people say date in URLs don’t matter in SEO but I strongly disagree. When searching for information in search engines it is always good to see when a page was published. Also when a search string contains a date, you are not only more likely to rank better for that search term but users are more likely to click on your page in the results if he sees that your page is written on the date they were searching for.

An eye tracking study on search engines conducted by Microsoft supports this. It shows that people are in fact using URLs a lot in search engine results when deciding whether to click on a page or not.

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