Search Engine Optimization is a great tool for the webmasters all around the world. In a way, the concept of SEO gives them ideas for maintenance and development of the website that they manage. But for the webmasters, the user friendliness index of the website is another very important issue. It is an absolute must to ensure that a visitor does not feel either in awe of the website you have created or gets disappointed with the low quality of information and a haphazard user interface. If you are the webmaster of a commercial website for some business or service, you must note that these are the kind of things which put off a potential buyer.
So let us look at how Search Engine Optimization and creation of user friendly websites go hand in hand, how their motives are basically the same.
Webpage designing is the first and foremost aspect of a website development. As a webmaster, you must be a fan of Flash and might want to use it to make your website attractive. But you must note that apart from the small number of broadband users, such a website is deemed unfriendly by dialup connection users who form the majority. Moreover, the crawlers and spiders from search engine spiders will not be access or understand Flash and you will lose valuable incoming traffic from search engines. So make it a point to use less of Flash and more of those features which make your website user friendly as well as crawler friendly.
Broken hyperlinks are a major put-off for the visitors of your website. They irritate the visitors no end and often they go to a competitor’s website. Imagine a highly undesirable business scenario when a prospective customer chooses a product to purchase after reading about its features and then finds out that the link which leads him to the transaction window is broken. Also it is an established fact that websites with a large number of broken links do not feature prominently in search engine results. So ensure that there are no broken links in your website and repair the ones you find out as soon as possible.
Search engines are not very friendly with images you use on your website and so you must make the job easier for them by adding descriptive alt tags for all the images that you use. Such descriptive tags also help users who are visually challenged and help able users to understand the meaning and significance of the images. It is an absolute must to ensure that complete paragraphs are not included in these image files as search engines do not display them in their results. A website friendly with both search engines and visitors must have a sitemap for sure. This tool gets new web pages indexed by search engines without any delay. It also helps a user locate himself on the website and allows for easy navigation.
In conclusion, one can say that while designing a website, give equal consideration to both search engines and your visitors.
