Site Navigation and Usability
Ditch the haughty ideas and focus on the client.
Navigation is the base of Usability
The first and important part of good usability is navigation. Nearly all other usability topics are built on, or in some way linked to navigation. This article will focus on some key tips you can use to develop your site navigation.
Navigation 101: Three click or Bust
When somebody visits your site for the first time, it’s regularly their first point of contact with your company, so the link with them is quite brittle. On average, people are willing to give you three clicks to find what they are searching for, and if they can’t reach their target end within those 3 little clicks, you have missing them. It’s particularly significant to organize your navigation so that any page of your site can be attain within 3 clicks of any other page, because users don’t forever enter at the homepage, particularly when they come from a search engine.
This point is actually what sparked this post. The ad agency mention above wasted two of these important clicks before a user was ever at the index page. Take a look at your site: When you have a new user, can they get to their target end in 3 clicks or less? If not, you require repairing your navigation. Users are likely to get lost without clear navigational path, so make it easy for them. Take time at the beginning of site development to make a good site map, and plan out navigational paths.
Redundancy is a good thing.
Give multiple paths to the same end. Take x product and make sure that client can get there through the main navigation, the related links in the text of the site, and through any other paths that make sense, for example through site search results. The key is to imagine like a user.
Get outside comment.
When developing a site, particularly navigation, it often is essential to get some people to visit your site who are completely unknown with your site and products, and get their feedback. You might be surprised. Often outside comment can you step back and see some fault you weren’t aware of.
Make sure it is easy to read.
Keep in mind that eye-tracking reading have shown the users eye tend to descend toward the top and left sides of the screen, starting with the top left corner, so those are prime place for navigation. Users should never have to scroll to get navigation links.
Site Navigation and Usability
Ditch the haughty ideas and focus on the client.
Navigation is the base of Usability
The first and important part of good usability is navigation. Nearly all other usability topics are built on, or in some way linked to navigation. This article will focus on some key tips you can use to develop your site navigation.
Navigation 101: Three click or Bust
When somebody visits your site for the first time, it’s regularly their first point of contact with your company, so the link with them is quite brittle. On average, people are willing to give you three clicks to find what they are searching for, and if they can’t reach their target end within those 3 little clicks, you have missing them. It’s particularly significant to organize your navigation so that any page of your site can be attain within 3 clicks of any other page, because users don’t forever enter at the homepage, particularly when they come from a search engine.
This point is actually what sparked this post. The ad agency mention above wasted two of these important clicks before a user was ever at the index page. Take a look at your site: When you have a new user, can they get to their target end in 3 clicks or less? If not, you require repairing your navigation. Users are likely to get lost without clear navigational path, so make it easy for them. Take time at the beginning of site development to make a good site map, and plan out navigational paths.
Redundancy is a good thing.
Give multiple paths to the same end. Take x product and make sure that client can get there through the main navigation, the related links in the text of the site, and through any other paths that make sense, for example through site search results. The key is to imagine like a user.
Get outside comment.
When developing a site, particularly navigation, it often is essential to get some people to visit your site who are completely unknown with your site and products, and get their feedback. You might be surprised. Often outside comment can you step back and see some fault you weren’t aware of.
Make sure it is easy to read.
Keep in mind that eye-tracking reading have shown the users eye tend to descend toward the top and left sides of the screen, starting with the top left corner, so those are prime place for navigation. Users should never have to scroll to get navigation links.
Importance of Internal Link Building
Most of the website receives more inbound links for their sites. The pages linked from other sites increases the rank, traffic and popularity of the site. Yahoo site explorer, Google webmaster tools can be used to find pages that are linked. It helps to strengthen and increase the weightage of the page. The internal links helps to improve usability of the site and add links to the content.
Multiple titles and descriptions
How does content generate backlinks?
In a search engine optimization, content could really be more use than just supply information related to a particular subject. One should be more meticulous in exploring how to use content to extract more than one benefit from it in search engine optimization terms. For example if the content is automatically spread across the internet, it is more beneficial from the search engine optimization perspective than a still content on the site which is being read by search engine crawlers but not being circulated around. Now you would be put forth 2 major questions:
1. How could my content be circulated?
2. What use will I get in the long run?
There are many easy ways to get your content circulated over the net.
1. Circulation through other external means
2. Circulation throughout the website.
You will be curious to note how your content could get circulated across the globe. All you have to do is make the content as informative and interesting as possible and put it in social book-marking lists of websites like reddit, delicious, wikipedia, digg etc. and relax. If your content is good enough you might realize, that you are the most popular writer on the internet! Social book marking websites are well proved platforms where users reading your content want to keep the article in their favorite list. This is the easiest means of receiving repeated traffic on to your content pages, which in turn are the most liked about your web page by the search engines. Also, seeing the growing popularity of your content, more users like to read, bookmark and recommend it to others.
One should consider that for search engine optimization, more your web page is bookmarked, higher is the main concern search engines give to you. This exercise doesn’t even require much effort than you writing a decent, informative and user-oriented content.
The second method is circulation through your site. The approach may sound similar to the one listed above, but is a different ball game. All you need to do is create a talk through your content. Discussion usually means sparking out a topic for users to like or dislike what you posted. This also involves accepting comments online where each visiting user expresses their opinion on the subject. This will generate an immense popularity for your web page and the site on the whole. In addition you would be surprised to note how your content becomes a point of discussion over diverse websites as well as discussion forums. Google, Yahoo, msn and other search engines are your fans! One has to note that this is the world of WEB 2.0 and more user interactivity you bloom, higher the rank you get!
Now you will be curious for the second major question of our discussion. Here one should be aware that with no social touch to your search engine optimization, the exercise would not yield results you had dreamt! Secondly, you are not only receiving popularity, but also extremely valuable back-links from related websites on the internet. Therefore when the search engines are counting the back-links to your website, you can be the one who is better placed. This is because you not only have the most appropriate links to your web page, but your links are mechanically growing arithmetically all along with your websites popularity.
Online networking business guides
Search Engine Optimization and English spell
Recently I was considering keywords used by the visitors to search my website and thought of discussing several issues related to spelling with other people.
I found a lot of people coming to my website are not using the correct spellings while searching in the search engines. It is fact that a huge number of people who use net through out the world do not have good knowledge in English. You may find lot of people of India, China, France, Germany, Russia and several other countries do lack in using correct English spellings.
One more problem is different spellings used by both UK English and International English. While web masters optimize their websites they pick the most commonly used terms and phrases with respect to their websites and they both follow the UK English or International English and optimize the sites accordingly. But for example if you are following UK English, your site may not come up on top ranking for that corresponding International English keyword. Some common examples are Organization and Organization, color and color, Optimization and Optimization etc.
I found many webmasters go after the following techniques to avoid the above problems:-
1. Use the alternative spelling of the keywords in the meta tags.
2. Use all probable variants and misspelled words in the main body.
3. Some people facade the misspelled words that they use the same color of the text as their page color therefore not visible to human but can crawled by search engine bots.
But I feel all the above tricks are no longer useful as Google don’t give much importance to meta tags now a day, no one will like putting misspelled words in the main body and the last one is strongly not suggested as many search engines don’t like this approach and may keep out your website from their index.
So what is the good Approach?
I recommend the following approaches to address the issue:-
1. Use the misspelled words in the Alt tags of your images, because many search engines index the alt tags.
2. Off Page Factors, as doing link building for your website, you could intentionally use the wrong or misspelled words in the anchor text and it would solve your problem to a great extent.
Reciprocal Link Exchange Among Sites
Three way linking
Three ways linking (site A -> site B -> site C -> site A) is a special kind of reciprocal linking. The effort of this link building technique is to make more “natural” links in the eye of search engines. The worth of links by three-way linking method can then be better than usual reciprocal links, which are typically made between two domains.
Automated linking
In order to take benefit of the need for inbound links to rank fine in the search engines, a variety of automatic link exchange services have been introduced. Members of this scheme will normally agree to have a number of links added to all their web pages in return for receiving similar links back from new sites.
Link exchange
An option to the automated linking over is a link exchange forum, in which member will advertise the sites that they desire to get links to, and will in turn proffer reciprocal or 3 way links back to the sites that link to them. The links generate by means of such services are subject to editorial assess.