USER ORIENTED WEBSITE INTERFACE Relevant Content & Copywriting YOU ARE HERE!

WEBSITE USEFULNESS: WRAPPING IT ALL UP

Optimize Your Copy for Users AND Search Engines

Although it's crucial to utilize user-oriented website copywriting, the fact that ONE IN THREE AMERICANS USE A SEARCH ENGINE can't be ignored.

Make pages for users, not for search engines. (Google Quality Guidelines)
It's also the basic principle of user-oriented website interface. The same is true for the best practices in website marketing across the search engines. Search engine optimization is NOT an exception.

Search engine optimization is the process of creating a website in a manner that allows it to be properly read, indexed and ranked by search engines. This is a minimal condition that must be accomplished to make your website indexable on search engines. A vital part of any marketing campaign is positioning the product in front of your targeted audience. In search engine marketing that translates to achieving top placements on search engine listings.

Your website needs to reach top placements for such terms that your target audience often use when searching, and are relevant to your business. Therefore, such terms need to be carefully researched, selected, and strategically and logically placed within your website copy.

Defining and analyzing your audience, their goals and needs is obligatory part of user-oriented design, for ensuring both website usability and usefulness. Not researching and incorporating the terms they utilize when searching on major engines would be at least sloppy.

Therefore, what is typically anticipated as search engine optimization, is actually integral component of user-oriented design. This logical and natural part of user-oriented interface design, in addition to getting improper label SEO, also gained a bad reputation, due to unethical techniques that some unscrupulous SEO companies utilized. Note that unethical SEO practices could neither ensure long-term results on search engines nor provide customer trust, loyalty and brand awareness.

Here is what GoogleGuy, Google representative participating in Webmaster World Forum, said (February 2004) on this topic:

"People think about how their pages will show up in search engines. That's SEO but perfectly normal. People tweak the words they use a little. Maybe they add a site map. Maybe they redo their site architecture so that the urls are static instead of dynamic. That's SEO, and no problem. Things like removing session IDs, using text links instead of Flash or frames or weird stuff that some search engines can't read can make a site more usable for users. It's easier to bookmark a page. It's easier for blind people, people with older browsers, or people using WebTV. All of the changes like this can improve a site for users and search engines alike. Is it SEO? Sure. Is it wrong? Of course not. "

Note that there is also a website GoogleGuySays, dedicated to outlining important comments by GoogleGuy, which could be quite useful as the addition to Google Guidelines.

Utilizing ethical SEO is, and should be, integral part of user-oriented website design.

Naturally, all the other principles of user-oriented design should also be applied while developing your website. This integral approach would not make your website just user and search engine friendly - it would make it irresistible to both humans and spiders.

If you are interested in the benefits Distinctia's integral approach to website development and marketing could ensure, please review What Makes Distinctia Different? section. If you need more information, feel free to contact us at gberich@distinctia.com.

User Oriented Design & Ethical Website Marketing Strategies by Distinctia, 2003