HUMAN Experience Design

As of today, this site is the #1 result (out of 89,000,000) for the words - human experience design. I noticed an uptick in my Google traffic, and behold - Google heaven.

Not bad for a non-commercial site where I just spout my own opinions about web design and such. I have actually had a couple of my web sites get fairly high rankings in the search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO), ultimately is a user experience issue - provided you deliver the goods.

You could have the best web site in the world, with a great user interface and tons of cool features, but if nobody knows about it, are you really serving the user?  However, SEO is a double edged sword - the signal to noise ratio of information on the web is very low. Most web sites are crap, and a lot of search engine results don’t have a crap filter.

The nice thing is that sites like Google are keeping abreast of the black hat SEO tricks. Sites selling Viagra don’t tend to come up anymore when you are searching for Pokemon. This is good user experience.

I don’t want to rehash the same old SEO tricks that you can find on a million web sites, but here are a few tips to help you and your users find each-other:

• Make your site as tightly niched as possible. Instead of a site about sports, focus on golf. Better yet, focus on left-handed golfers.
• Have good information architecture, with well organized and clearly labeled content categories. Provide navigation that makes sense.
• Think about your user - what would they be typing into a search engine if they wanted to find you?
• Design your site well, being as semantic in your markup as possible. Use heading tags for headings, and lists for lists. Keep your markup as simple as possible.
• Make sure your site is accessible to assistive technology like screen readers. many search engines that crawl your site look at things in a way similar to screen readers.
• Make sure your site works. No broken links! No broken images!
• Decrapulate your site (my word - I want to invent a web tool called a decrapulator). Remove excessive links, banner ads, animations etc. Search engines like information.

That’s it. You can certainly find more tricks of the trade all over the web, but I’m concerned with the stuff that will please the humans who use the search engines.

The black hat tricks may work for a while, and you might get some traffic. You could also wind up banned from many search engines. If your users feel tricked into coming to your site - what’s that going to get you? 

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 7:47 am and is filed under , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.