Usability and SEO

Jakob Nielsen has just written a blog post about SEO and Usability in which he briefly describes the relationship between the two disciplines.

I agree with Jakob, but I think it’s worth saying that building online service with user experience as your top priority will result in having solid SEO anyway. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t think that you should forget about the SEO completely - quite the opposite actually.

Thing is that if you focus on the users from the very beginning, you’ll always have a chance to tweak or enhance the SEO later. What doesn’t work though is the reversal of this process. If you start with the SEO as your foundation, and then try “adding” usability on top of it, you’ll end up with a product that doesn’t serve either purpose.

If you think about it, building a user focused service means getting a number of things right. Typically you should:

• Organise content so it’s easy to understand and navigate.
• Produce relevant content that reflects what readers would like to read or see.
• Design URL structure so that it’s human readable and reflects how content is organised and indicates where users currently are within the site’s structure.
• Structure HTML mark-up so that it has a small footprint, making sure that relevant HTML elements are used for their purpose - page titles, window titles, emphasis, quotes, images, paragraphs, meta tags etc.
• Create a scannable layouts using meaningful headings and subheadings, and paragraphs of appropriate length.
• Use plain, concise, marketese free language that’s easy to read and understand, and stay away from “clever” words and pun headlines.
• Help users to get to more information by using relevant broader category and outbound links.

A complete list of what makes good UX would obviously be longer than this, but the point is that these are just the things that will find in the SEO books. And the best part is that you get that part of the SEO work for free, just because you deep dive with your users’ needs.