3 Ways SEO Web Design Can Be User Friendly

They say the power of search stops once you land on the web page.

Nowadays, with a few waves of the CSS magic wand a website can be both functional and appealing to visitors, without forgetting any principles of SEO web design.

However, it’s still easy to forget the real purpose of our websites is usability and search engine optimization. So here are just a few reminders about how SEO can be user-friendly. Use them as a starting point when you review your own site, looking for the marriage of SEO and usability.

1. Navigation with tabs is common, however breadcrumb links offer SEO benefits (since you are using anchor text rather than an image) and a usability advantage. They remind your visitor what page he is viewing, eliminating confusion.
2. If you have an e-commerce site or a content-heavy site, you are probably using a search bar. For the ultimate in user friendliness, place the search bar in the top fold area of the page. Also consider offering category search for improved user-experience.
3. We all know spiders frown upon flash and pages with more than 100kb of load. On the user-side, you only have a few seconds to convince the user to stay. So it’s better show them what they’re looking for immediately, without letting heavy animation take center stage.

These are just a few SEO and usability tips. Basically, the rule of thumb is to make your site accessible to readers, as well as the search engines. Remember, if you wish to measure ROI the goal isn’t just traffic, but conversion as well. To help you create effective codes for your page, I’d like to share an interesting post I read here about content-to-code ratio of your page, and its impact on search engine optimization.