Sphinn - When SEO & Usability Go Head To Head

61
Sphinn It!

Went Hot: August 15, 2008 - 11:07 pm
Posted By: UtahSEOpro 109 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk)
Category: SEO

At times what’s best for the user doesn’t always seem to be what’s best for the search engine and vice versa so compromises have to be made. I’ve gone over here some of the most common flash points between usability and SEO best practice I see.

5 Comments

Who Desphunn This (0)

Comments

from Halfdeck 108 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

"The compromise"

There's no such thing as a compromise. Usability trumps SEO every time (if you're working on a white hat site).

"If the links not visible to the user should it be there?

In practice this may not be such a problem as if a user can’t see a link at all they’ll rarely know any different, but if its just a really subtle link like a faint underline it could cause problems so either hide them properly or better still don’t hide them at all!"

Very interesting advice.

from thegoldenhat 107 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

I disagree that usability trumps SEO every time. Think of user input requirements for example. If a site requires a user to enter zip, city, state and/or other geographic information on the home page prior to navigating to any other page in the site, then certainly SEO must be taken into consideration. Although the user inputs will direct the user toward targeted information they were looking for, the site will have substantial crawlability and indexing issues if no other crawlable links point to the lower level pages of the site. The site, then, isn't much help to several users if it never gets indexed and/or ranks.

That site could employ user agent detection to render a version of the home page with or without the user inputs, but that is an SEO tactic that strikes the middle ground between usability and optimization.

I'd definitely say that a healthy balance is essential and is dependent on a case by case basis.

JMO

Interesting thoughts though with this article. Definitely a good read!

from JohnHGohde 107 days ago # - show/hide this comment

Votes: -2 | Vote:

+ -

Depends on the objectives of the site. In SEM, throw away websites are often created to Spam search engines. I think usability is hardly a consideration in this type of SEM work.

from Erika 106 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

"#3 Hidden content

While slick ‘web2’ stuff like content stashed in javascript spans can be a handy way to get more content on the page without compromising design, lending itself well to SEO. In reality the implementation of this stuff tends to fall short of usable. Anything which causes a page to lengthen when activated and drop below the fold can cause extra scrolling which doubles the work of the user who has to click to reveal the extra content then move back to their scrollbar to see it."

There is something referred to as a reasonable expectation of response. If you click on a tab, you expect a response. If you click a link, you expect something to happen. The implementation of this kind of scripting isn't a usability issue. If anything, cluttering a page to fit all this stuff in and effectively screwing the screen real estate is the larger issue. After too long, when people can't see something related to what they're looking for, they stop looking.

from reese 106 days ago #

Votes: 0 | Vote:

+ -

The balance among SEO, usability and design is an art not always easily acheived.

I appreciated the reminder about things like your average user not knowing what a "digg" is. I might think twice and pop a "what's this" tool tip on sites when appropriate.

Top 10 Most Sphunn
In What's New

5 SEO Tools You Might Be Missing (21)
30 Tips on How to Get, Convince, Ke... (21)
Could you Buy or Sell Social Media ... (18)
The End of Fake Avatars? (15)
fRank Takes on PageRank (14)
5 Critical PPC Budgeting Problems (13)
16 Business Lessons for Freelancers (12)
How To Actually Get Links From Your... (12)
Top 10 Reasons for PPC & SEO Synerg... (11)
Rumors: Microsoft in talks to buy Y... (11)

Latest Comments

Save the date for:
• SMX West - Feb. 10-12, 2009
• SMX Munich - April 22-23, 2009
• SMX Social Media Marketing - April 29-30
• SMX Advanced - June 2-3, 2009