Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

Within the last week, I’ve been lucky enough to secure a ticket for Search Engine Strategies Chicago on December 8-11th. One of the panelists, Randy Pickard of UserCentric (based here in Chicago) is presenting something very near and dear to me: Usability & SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One. I was fortunate enough to interview Randy and hear what he has to say about usability, search engines, flash, and how much longer we have to deal with “www”.

1. Being both a search engine marketer and usability professional can often be a challenge. On the usability side, you want to provide the best user experience possible by only providing the absolute most pertinent information in the simplest form possible. On the search engine marketer side, you have to provide enough information for search engines to associate your website with the right keywords, often making website copy redundant or cumbersome. How do you balance those two worlds?

Making your site usable always comes first. There is little point in driving traffic via SEO to a site if visitors do not like the site and exit immediately. Usable sites generate multiple page views, repeat visits, and transactions. Stating the obvious, it is best to optimize for both usability and search. Effective SEO says “Look – we have what you want!”. When those people arrive at the site, good usability says “Look – here it is!”. If you can design the user interface to say “Look – we have what you want, and here it is!”, it is a win-win. However, if you attend the Search Engine Stategies – Chicago session on “Usability & SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One” on December 9, I am on the panel and will outline nine areas of conflict that can be challenging to resolve. Redundant copy is just one of the nine areas of conflict that will be discussed.

Conflicts between usability and SEO should be resolved in large part based on how visitors are finding the website. If visitors are arriving based on: 1) searching for the name of the website; 2) inputting the site’s URL directly into the address bar , or 3) coming to the site via direct links from other sites or paid search, most usability versus SEO conflicts should be resolved in favor of usability. However, if the majority of a site’s traffic is the result of algorithmic search engine referrals resulting from keyword term searches, it may be to appropriate to consider resolving some conflicts with a bias favoring SEO considerations.

The best way to avoid usability and SEO conflicts is to address both at the beginning of the website development process. Usability and SEO should both be considered during the information architecture stage.

2. Flash. That one word phrase is enough to make both an SEO and usability expert cringe. There have been a number of strides made in terms of helping Flash become indexed by search engines as well as making it more usable, however, there is still lots to be done. Can you think of one major obstacle still to be overcome by Flash that could help both SEO and usability?

The use of Flash should be dependent on the mission of the site and the target users. For academic, professional, and informational sites it is an abomination based on usability, SEO considerations, and accessibly to build a website entirely with Flash. Most people still have a much better device for displaying animation sitting in their living room, their TV. However, in many cases, trying to talk a client out of using Flash is a no win proposition. Many clients will not be satisfied with a site that appears to be static, regardless of how much effort you expend on explaining the drawbacks of Flash and other animation tools.

There are numerous tutorials on the Web on creating alternate html content for a Flash site and on how to embed Flash within an html site. The two biggest obstacle to overcome are: 1) the time consuming aspects of creating and updating a site with alternative content in both Flash and html, and 2) the fact that too many web designers’ primary interest seems to be the depth of their portfolio, which leads to overlooking either embedding Flash within a solid base of html or creating alternative content in html. Thus, a tool that allowed for simultaneous creation of both Flash and spider accessible html content would be a boon to Flash developers.

3. Microformats can provide so much additional semantic information for websites benefiting both usability and search engine optimization efforts, yet they are not very widely adopted. Why do you think this is?

My perception is that adoption of microformats will be a very slow process. Critical mass may not be obtained until at least one major organization makes promoting microformats a priority mission. Three of the factors holding back the adoption of the semantic web are: 1) lack of standards; 2) xml is already widely accepted for commercial applications, thus the .com universe probably does not perceive the “hassle” factor to be a worthwhile trade-off for the benefits; and 3) viewers are seemingly satisfied with the gradually improving quality of search engine results, thus there is no hue and cry for the development of semantic markup.

I think that among a sizable swath of designers and developers, there IS a movement toward semantic markup, at least in spirit, if not always in practice. Here are some reasons designers and developers may not be jumping on the microformat bandwagon.

1. Visibility: From the point of view of a production person, microformats are somewhat invisible when used, except to users of the sites that harvest them. This makes them one of the easiest things to cut when time is running low and you’re under pressure, because “nobody will notice” in a big way if you omit them for a web site’s launch. Unfortunately, “for launch” has a tendency to become “for good” when other projects arise.

2. Chicken-and-egg: Until microformats are widely adopted by the publishers of raw content, sites that harvest microformat info will have a small pool of info to draw on, and their success may be limited by this. On the other hand, until these imaginative sites become successful, it may be hard for content publishers to justify spending extra time on microformats that have limited immediate benefit.

3. Confusing: Microformats are also a bit hard to grasp, even when you know where to look. They are highly distributed, cooperative, and “mashed-up” in nature. From the content publisher’s point of view, it takes some research and tinkering to understand their potential benefits. From the content harvester / masher-up’s point of view, it takes imagination to create useful and successful applications for microformats.

4. Reservation about mashups? Perhaps some people have reservations about “setting their content free” in this way – making it so openly available for inclusion in other sites that they don’t know where it will show up and how it will be used there.

4. There is a growing movement to remove “www” from the url structure of many websites. Do you think this is just a rogue movement and that “www” is part of every users web behavior or do you think “www” is no longer needed when referring to websites?

My teenage son is already dismissive of my typing “www” into the address bar of a browser when inputting a URL. Given that he is a pretty good source for discerning up and coming trends, I judge it to be inevitable that “www’ will disappear, just as “http” is no longer in standard usage. However, “www” is such a accepted part of the lexicon, that URL’s both with and without “www” will be likely be common for at least a couple more years.

5. Of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, and AOL. Which do you think has the most usable interface for discovering information? Why?

I use multiple search engines. If I am single mindedly focused on search, I use Google or Ask. However, if I also want to glance at how the financial markets are performing, I use Yahoo, and if I want to check out the headlines I utilize MSN. The search box is front and center and prominently displayed on all the major engines, and download time is not an issue on broadband connections, so my personal answer to this question is “it depends”.