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In our current understanding of good SEO practice many spend hours trying to find the best ways to explode traffic into a site by making sure its pounded into the search engines by every method known to man (and other) in this wicked realm of search engine optimization. You can not forget that the usability of a site is just as important as search engine optimization. When we talk about the marketing aspect of a website it is important that your site is created for the user to the upmost standards of usability in today's industry. Personally if i was to pay somebody large amounts of money to make my site engine friendly it would be a waste of my time and my money now a days. The way the future is going is in the market of usability. Take the time to map out the areas of your website, have a test group go through your current site and figure out the factors that provide the best and worst results of the areas that you want targeted most for when consumers or viewers come through your site. You can see that google has already tackled this for your adsense ads. They know from previous stats that in 5-6 areas specific to positioning on your web site it will produce for you the best results in terms of click through rates. They do this because they must provide their advertisers with clicks to get people to their web sites. We dont look at it this way tho. We look at it in ways of "im going to stick my ad up and hope it makes money"..which in some cases it does.. however when you look at your results in the months to come you wonder why it fluctuates from time to time in drastic measures.
Well instead of assuming that your traffic is decreasing because of poor SEO, lets switch that theory in the way that your site is not pleasing a customer to click on your ads. You can either try and pound for more traffic and waste away valuable thinking on your site or take what traffic the search engine is giving you and making sure you get the best CTR possible on your site. Here is how I usually test my site for quality performance.
#1. Cut your site up into 5 areas. Header, Footer, Left and Right Navigation and Content. This is how a general site is setup.
#2. Be prepared in your testing to make sure you have atleast two seperate areas contained in each of your cut up pieces to be used for testing with your ads or targeted product.
#3. Place your ad or targeted product in one area for two weeks and keep a close eye on your logs and stats for that particular ad.
#4. After week two, take down your ad from that location and place it in the other designated area in your area of choice. Track the stats that come from that area and compare the two.
#5. Review your stats from the compared data and turn it into a working model. Lets look at this next step.
#6. Pretend you are the customer coming into your site. What is it that you are looking for and how are you looking for it. This question is brought up with me alot and the way I go about it is the following.
#7. A book is read left to right (usually). From left to right on your web site you are going to see advertisements in the locations you have chosen from your data contained in your testing. The next step is leading in.
#8. What words or images lead towards your web site. If I had a customer sitting on the edge of a wall..and on the other side of the wall was the purchase they were going to make, what would it take for that consumer to fall off the edge of the wall onto that product. In this case we are talking about a mouse pointed and the ability to get them thinking that they need to click.
#9. Best proven ability. Have a strong lead in with your content, content that really gets the reader enjoying what hes seeing..intrigues them, makes them think, makes them want and finally makes them need. Its like a strawberry melted in chocolate for the ladies. After you have used your fine descriptive words (that can also be used for SEO purposes) have an ad placed below that content, it cuts up their thinking and puts them in the direction of clicking based on the knowledge they learned from before. The rest of the information below that ad will just focus on less important topics then the top of the article there for enforcing that the ads have more information or the right product they need to click on.
Forget about the importance of spending hours and hours continuing to link build. We know the importance of starting a site and how SEO will give it a kick boost. But after the 4-5 month period of trial and error with SEO tricks, kick into the thinking mode that your new SEO becomes WUO (Web Usability Optimization). Sink your traffic into the thinking of want, need and click. A web site is just an illusion that people have no idea they are involved in. Twist your reality viewers in your virtual world and the return will be extensive. Your in control now. Not the search engine.
Hope this helps, and of course. This is my opinion but I have been testing many theories and misunderstandings of a well thought web site. And in my findings, Usability out plays SEO in the end always. Take care, and i hope this gets a few of you thinking in a new direction if you have a decent web site out there with a product or ad targeted audience.
Take Care.
-Barhopper
One point only that I woul disagree with: I've never met a site that could not benefit from more quality link building, more/better marketing partnerships, and deeper thinking about future development strategies. 4-5 months working on a site is not nearly long enough, IF one intends that the site be a long term presense on the Web.
That said, there is no reason why usability/conversion testing, and site dev/marketing dev, cannot co-exist. In fact they should, and as you rightly suggest, I'd wager that the majority of webmasters who focus on SEO probably don't spend enough time thinking about usability and conversion.
Bar
I understand in broad terms the need to drive traffic to my site and also the need to have a user friendly site when they get there.
The trouble is that the advice I am getting about how to acheive one is not compatible with the other (if I have understood things correctly).
On the one hand I am being told by an SEO company that Google etc. places a lot of emphasis when determining its rankings on text within a page - thus I need text heavy pages loaded with my search term. (I am also aware of the role played by inbound links.)
On the other hand usability experts like Neilsen and Krug tell me that I should cut down on the amount of text as users don't read it / are put off by it.
Given the treatment dished out to BMW recently, I am unhappy with implementing a doorway page and don't want to insert new text heavy pages to my site. What should I do?
Any advice would be appreciated as I am a non-technical person who has done what feels like loads of reading around the subject without finding any reassuring answers!
...Google etc. places a lot of emphasis when determining its rankings on text within a page - thus I need text heavy pages
That conclusion does not necessarily follow. Some text? Absolutely yes; pretty pictures with a six word description probably won't cut it. But does that mean text-heavy pages? There are plenty of counter-examples on many SERPs. Pages of many different word-counts can be seen in the top three spots.
...usability experts like Neilsen and Krug tell me that I should cut down on the amount of text as users don't read it / are put off by it.
It's been my experience that well targeted traffic WANTS to see information. Real information, pertinent to the offering that is, not bloated prose generated to stuff in keywords.
A good copy writer can achieve both ends, both SEO and a solid usability/conversion approach. And a good page designer can create an information-packed page that is still easy to scan for the more minimally qualified visitor.
However, I wouldn't give too mauch energy twoard trying to convert the marginal traffic. The best way to increase conversions is to focus your efforts towards your IDEAL prospect rather than trying to "cast a wide net."
Combining SEO and user-friendliness on the same page is more art than science. There is no set formula that can be mechanically followed. But in the past year, I do see Google's oft-repeated advice becoming more of a reality: create pages (primarily) for your customers. Just make sure you include enough cues for the search engines, and don't place any obstacles in the way of a spider.
That conclusion does not necessarily follow. Some text? Absolutely yes; pretty pictures with a six word description probably won't cut it. But does that mean text-heavy pages?
I suppose that is a point of view (your art v science arguement) thing really, I am being advised to have a page per search term on my site with between 400 and a 1000 words specifically dedicated to that term. At present there isn't a single page on my site with 300 words on it! Your post above is 296 words long and I personally feel that a block of text (even broken up / bullet pointed etc) that big would be offputting.
It's been my experience that well targeted traffic WANTS to see information. Real information, pertinent to the offering that is, not bloated prose generated to stuff in keywords.
I agree that a user will want to see real information and I instinctively feel that putting up / crowbarring in 400 words peppered sufficiently with the keyword will not wash - people will switch off. Even if you can avoid the bloated prose, there are only so many times you can insert a keyword into 400 words before it becomes wearing and counterproductive surely?
This is what I mean by text heavy - perhaps I'm in the minority?
By the way I'm not a designer / webmaster / marketeer who wants a graphically orientated site - clean, simple, well written text is fine by me. I am just trying to understand how to get the best balance between driving traffic and converting it so that I get the best return on my money!
Well instead of assuming that your traffic is decreasing because of poor SEO, lets switch that theory in the way that your site is not pleasing a customer to click on your ads.
So, what you are really investigating is a way to build "made for Adsense" web pages that will suck in readers, and then encourage them to exit via adverts for other sites?
Matt
