SEO Report – Website Usability: Avoiding Mistakes

It’s your goal to have your website rank well, but to bring about the desired results from your search engine optimization efforts, you must pay careful attention to details and avoid the many pitfalls that may appear in your path. There are many factors that you might dismiss as trivial, but which could turn out to be factors that kill your online performance. Let’s take a quick look at some of the mistakes that are commonly found find in websites. If you find the same mistakes in your website then you should waste no time but immediately address them.

One of the main problems that unsatisfactorily performing websites present is poor navigation and poor usability issues. Poor navigation makes it difficult for the search bots to crawl your website completely, so you end up with only partial crawling. This will not only affect the search engine indexing, but it will also make it difficult for your website visitors to find the information that they need from your website.

Your website’s home page is the most likely one to be listed in the search results. When people visit your website’s homepage they should be able to find the most important information in your website easily. Internet users are impatient, and won’t spend a lot of time searching for the information they need. Your website should have an intuitive architecture, with pertinent information clearly visible so users don’t have to look for information.

If users have to register in order to enter your website and sign in to use certain features of your website, the signup and sign in box should be on the right side of the upper half of your page – because that is where internet user’s eyes will search for signup button. All of the major websites like Google, Yahoo, etc, have the sign in box in this same location. Internet users are accustomed to these sites, and accustomed to looking in the same place on other websites for similar information.  (This is part of online user psychology and would be taken into consideration during the build of website architecture to increase the conversion rates.)

Always spend some quality time reviewing your website architecture from the user’s perspective. In your view, placing certain information or image in a particular place will be visually more appealing, but this may not translate to usability for your website users. You should avoid such mistakes to ensure that your websites gets not only good ranking but that it also gets good conversions.

Another ‘rookie’ mistake is to fill your entire page with images. The web hosting industry is well known for their clutters home pages, and make further mistakes; besides filling their homepage with images, they even include their web hosting plans in the images. This leaves search engine bots with very little content to index. As a result their search ranking can be adversely affected . You must review your website and if you are making the ‘too much images or Flash’ mistake in your website, then you should add enough content to your homepage and to other pages that do not have enough content to make them more valuable from an SEO perspective.