Your process of search engine marketing is incomplete if you do not consider the important factor of usability. As a website owner you should understand that whatever content you create it must cater to the need of audience, only then it will benefit your visitors and hence search engine optimization. Your SEO practices and usability factor work in complete harmony with each other and if you ignore the usability factor, then your idea of launching social media marketing campaign also goes in vain. You have to understand the changing behavior of your audience and their growing needs in order to modify your search engine optimization strategies. If you incorporate the following tips in your SEO plan, then your successful search engine marketing is ensured;

• SEO and User Optimization- While designing your website, you have to focus on your users because this will help you in streamlining your search engine marketing. If you understand the nuances of good representation of your website on search engines, then you can ensure good usability from the audience end. You must well optimize your website so that your audience finds it useful and relevant to its needs.

• Web Usability – When designing your website for search engine marketing, you should also focus on the fact that your audience can only comprehend easy and quick information. If you want to enhance your social media marketing also, even then your emphasis should be to offer quick responses to all your users. Your website should be as interactive as possible because the users to your website should not switch to some other website due to navigation issues.

• Usability Testing- Your website’s success lies in successful search engine marketing and if you want to analyze the usability factor, then you should conduct usability testing for your effective SEO. You might find it time consuming but if you have spent good amount in website development, then it is beneficial for you to invest in testing also.
• Web Accessibility and SEO – Your understanding of the web accessibility feature is extremely important for your social media marketing. If you want to ensure usability factor, then your SEO success depends on an interesting feature of making your information available to the disabled also. If you target disabled class, then your search engine marketing will be a great success and your website will attract more traffic. You will also ensure better user experience by making use of web accessibility.

So, if you are looking forward to make your search engine optimization and social media marketing profitable and relevant, then your understanding of the above mentioned tips will lead you to higher position in search engine ranking.

Google’s old keyword suggestion drop down box design -

Original Google keyword suggestion dropdown box

Google’s new keyword suggestion drop down box design -

Another example of A/B testing .

I was going through the adwords blog a few days ago.  It said that the loading time of a landing page will affect the quality score of a site.
Load time is the amount of time taken for a user to see the landing page after clicking on an ad.

The reasons stated for doing this are:

1.    Users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business.

2.    Users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.
Google says that this change should be made in the next couple of weeks. Load Time evaluations will be added to the Keyword Analysis Page after which there will be a one month notice period to review your site and make necessary adjustments.

After the notice period, the minimum bids for the sites will be adjusted. ie. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

Google is here with another product for the internet user. They are entering the Web Browser arena with their upcoming browser, Google Chrome, whose Beta version is launching at any moment today.

Certainly, Google has pioneered in bringing some really state-of-the-art tools for its users. But, what we need to look forward to is that how much can it succeed in the so-called new and fresh user experience that they are promising to build.

Let us take an insight into some of the major features that Google has talked about in their 38 page comic about the Google Chrome.

• They want to create a browser addressing the needs of today’s web applications
• They claim it to be more stable, faster & secure and a clean, simple & efficient user interface(compared to other browsers)
• Faster JavaScript by making the browser a multi-process application and the JS engine asynchronous & multi-threaded
• Uses open-source components from Apple’s Webkit & Mozilla Firefox
• The V8 Team from Denmark has designed a JavaScript Virtual Machine which is to be plugged into the browser
• The address bar offers search suggestions, top visited pages, popular pages and a history search
• The default page lists out your nine most visited pages & some of the sites you use to search
• No popups
• Sandboxing of each process ensures that malwares cannot access data from the computer

What needs to be noticed is how many users apart frorm techies and geeks can Google reach out to, and how many people stay on with it. If the browser is really something that is going to enhance user experience as much as Google has promised to, it shall sustain. And looking at Google’s past record with new products, this is something that seems very likely to happen.

I’ve been working in the SEO industry for quite a while now and feel that using analytics really helps you to better understand your site, the users coming in to your site and their behavior when they are actually navigating through the pages. In some ways you can say that analytics is a mirror for a site and goes a long way to help you understand site usability.

Not long ago there was Urchin that provided all the statistics, although I must confess that it was all numbers in there and sometimes you wouldn’t blame a person if he/she were to zone out after looking at all those numbers.

Then in mid 2007 Google came up with the new and improved version of Google Analytics and the world of web analytics completely changed. You had user friendly graphs, pie-charts, maps, statistics and the works, all free of cost. All you had to do was to upload a simple code on the pages of your site and you were ready to go.
For Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I feel that Google Analytics is both advantageous and disadvantageous. Let’s talk about a few advantages first.
1. Distribution of Traffic
I love the way Google uses a pie chart to show a breakup of the major traffic sources. You get to know exactly how many visitors enter your site directly (typing the domain name in the browser) vis-à-vis organic search results, paid search results (if you run a PPC campaign), referrals and other sources.
2. Keyword Analytics
This, I feel is by far the most SEO friendly data as it gives you all the information as to which keywords people are using to enter your site on search engines. In short it lets you peek into the mind of your visitors and potential customers. You can get detailed reports on which keywords are driving the organic search traffic to your site and which are not. You can also get an idea as to which PPC keywords work for you and can be targeted for SEO. It also helps in a major way to chalk out a list of negative keywords for your site and get ideas for fresh content and products.
3. Map Overlay
This is the feature I like the most interactive as it shows a geographical distribution of the traffic coming in to the site on a world map. It helps you to know about the countries and cities that generate the most traffic.

Now a few disadvantages for the SEO campaign of the site.
1. JavaScript Code
Everyone who’s anyone in the SEO business is familiar that Google Analytics uses a JavaScript code. Moreover it is a common known fact that JavaScript is not search engine friendly and may act as spider stopper for Search Engine Spiders and Bots.
2. Dependency on Google
By using Google Analytics you solely rely on Google for all your data. Moreover there is no such facility as yet for archiving this data in a proper format. You are stuck if Google decides to change the reporting system one fine day and you have absolutely no control over it.

In short, every one of us is solely on Google’s mercy and has to abide by its rules, which I think is not fair at times.

Unlike the popular belief that only SEO and PPC campaigns help increase the conversion rate on a website, I think Website Usability is also an important factor. Both website usability and SEO/SEM are iterative processes, meaning that methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a work in progress.
“On the Web, findability is a huge challenge. Can your users find your website? If they do, Can they find their way around your website? And, can they find your products and services despite your website? When you start asking these sorts of questions, it becomes obvious there’s no bright line separating usability, findability, information architecture, and SEO.” said Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios.

There are various elements that can annoy your users :
1. Illegible Fonts: Small fonts or fonts that don’t match the look of your site.
2. Links & Navigation: The links that have been visited by the user should be displayed in a different color to avoid confusing the user. For sites with a lot of links, navigation becomes easier when the user can distinguish between the visited and the unvisited links.
3.Violating design conventions: Inconsistency is another major issue. All the pages on the site should maintain a flow. The pages should have some sort of consistency and not look like different websites altogether. e.g. the colors of the pages, the positions of certain links like the “sign-out” button etc..
4. Product differentiation & comparison: Emphasize what your site offers that’s of value to users and how your services differ from those of key competitors
5. Make the site’s purpose clear: Include a one-sentence tag line – Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does.
6. Help users find what they need: clear search box
7. Other Errors: Typos, bugs in the script, corrupted data and linkrot(unused links)

At the heart of iterative design is the objective observation of interaction between users and an interface: not focus groups, not web analytics, and not an SEO professional’s personal opinion about website usability.

There are a lot of sites out there that get tons of good traffic through search engines but don’t get their fair share of leads or sales.
Most visitors search, land up on the site and just leave.

I often get asked if it is even possible to get better conversions on a site? Or all you can do is work on getting more visitors by investing in SEO, PPC and all the other forms of internet marketing.

Well, it is important to keep working on the internet marketing campaigns that you’re running but it is definitely possible to improve conversions.

Some simple mistakes that I often see on sites is -

1 – No clear message -

If you’re offering a service or product build your website around it. Don’t confuse a visitor by offering him tons of irrelevant data.
2 – Passive Goal Marketing -

You want the visitor to fill up a form, or click on the Buy button? Well, actively tell them to do that. Don’t hide your contact or buy buttons and hope that people will notice and click. Be extremely clear about what you want the user to do and then make it easy for him to do it.

3 – Trust Elements -

Everyone thinks twice before giving out their payment and personal information. Tell them that it’s safe. Use those trust elements like the Verisign secure certificate, Anti-Hack symbol, etc that you may have purchased to re-assure potential buyers.

4 – Browser Compatibility -

Check your site with the popular browsers. Often, designers don’t bother to do that and it can affect conversions. No one is going to purchase stuff from a site that they can’t view in their browser.

5 – Use soothing Colors -

A professional website cannot be bright red and black. You may be fond of these colors, but if it is a professional service you offer stick to the safe blues and whites or a color that’s associated with your professional service.

I hope these tips help you. You can check out the articles’ section at Convonix for more detailed articles on website usability and internet marketing.