The purpose of your website is to drive users and sales not please Google’s web crawler.  That said, most good SEO also makes for a better user experience.  Your description meta tag is used by Google for the description the user sees when exploring Google’s search results for a given keyword.  If your description is accurate and helpful that prepares the user for a good experience on your site.  If the description is inaccurate then you may get clicks and visitors but your sales will suffer because the user leaves your site frustrated.  Make enough people cranky and those users will share their displeasure on other blogs and forums.

Good SEO is about creating a good user experience.  Sometimes good SEO and a good user experience are odds but not often.  Organizing your site along logical categories with a naturally flowing hierarchy helps users find useful information and it helps Google search your site more efficiently.

Good Site Organization is Good for Users and SEO

Let’s say you are looking for a piece of software to help you automate your SEO.  You’ve run a Google search and you begin exploring the resulting organic and advertised pages.

The first page in the search results has a description of an SEO tool that will populate backlinks all over the internet guaranteeing your page high page rank and a presence on the first page of search results for any keyword.  You are curious so you click and the link sends you a page selling website analytics services.  Obviously this isn’t what you were looking for so you leave.

The second page in the search results has a description of another SEO tool that sounds great.  You click and the link sends you to great sales copy for a tool that exactly matches your expectations (as set by the description meta tag) and you are ready to buy.  On that sales page the company has mentioned a Platinum edition of the software that is only $10 more and comes with a dozen great features you want.  But they forgot to provide a link to that Platinum edition.  You search every link you can find on the website for 15 minutes and eventually leave without buying anything.

The two examples are obviously bad user experiences that are inexcusable.  If this is your site, those mistakes make you look like an amateur hack and then potential customers will begin creating reasons to not trust you and your company.

While these two examples are obvious less obvious site navigation issues can cause potential customers to think you are an amateur hack.  If they find your article on Ezine, follow the link to your site, read a longer general information page on your site but can’t find a link to a page with deeper, more specific information then they will likely leave.  If people can’t find that deeper page then the Google web crawler may not either.  A page can’t be ranked if the crawler never finds it.  That’s bad SEO, bad business, and bad user experience rolled into one.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps can solve the problem of the web crawlers finding your page.  And sitemaps are recommended by every SEO pro.  They are a necessary tool but think that a Sitemap will solve your user experience problems.  Most users don’t look for a Sitemap link and have no interest in looking at an index of all of your pages in a vain attempt to find the deeper information page they are looking for.

Organizing your Sitemap can help you when looking for dead links or adding a new link.  Organization will help any user that actually looks at your Sitemap.  And finally organizing your Sitemap help your SEO because you are less likely to forget a link and the spiders are more likely to categorize your pages correctly and find them.

Don’t

• Let your Sitemap get stale and out of date
• List pages on your Sitemap without any organization

Breadcrumbs can Save Your Users

Breadcrumbs are a series of links typically at the top of the page showing either where you are in the website’s organization like:

PrintersàInkàInkjetsàColor Cartridges

Or the breadcrumbs will show the last few pages you visited in order with the last page being farthest to the right like:

PrintersàModel G85àModel G95àDriversàInk

The importance of breadcrumbs is that when a user is searching for something on your site and a given click doesn’t get them closer to their desired page then they click on one of the breadcrumb links to get back to the page they felt was closest to their desired page.  Most pages have more than one link and a user will return to the page closest (in their estimation) to the one they want click on the links they find on that page.  Breadcrumbs keep your users on the site longer giving you a better chance to make the sale.

Google does, somehow, track user behavior on your site.  The longer a user spends on your site the better Google will rank your site.  Breadcrumbs keep your users on the site longer making for good SEO.  (Note that there is speculation that Google Caffeine, the new search algorithm currently in beta, will give even more weight to user behavior than the current algorithm does.)

Custom 404 pages and SEO

Your site gets an SEO penalty when Google finds too many 404 – Page not found – pages on your site.  Technically every site has an infinite number of 404 pages based on users typing in the wrong URL.  However, Google only finds 404 pages when their web crawler has followed a dead (or bad) link.  Too many 4004 pages and Google interprets that to mean you’ve let the site get stale and you have a lot of dead links out there (most of them are probably on your site’s pages).

Using 301 (permanent) redirects for dead pages or common mis-typings of your pages’ URLs is the best solution.  However, you can’t prevent the user or someone else on the web from mis-typing the full URL of a deep page.  Custom 404 pages help give the user a way back to the rest of your site and Google looks more kindly (read better SEO) on sites with these Custom 404 pages.  Google will even help you create custom 404 pages for your site with Google site search embedded so a user can attempt to find the page they wanted instead of simply being sent back to the home page; these Google custom 404 pages won’t match your site’s look and feel but they will be functional and you can manually add a template to them.

Avoid the following SEO no-nos

1. Linking every page to every other page
2. Creating a lot of little pages such that it takes a user a lot of clicks to find the deep content
3. Using text exclusively (or even mostly) for navigation – menus and graphics are better for user experience

Having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations (this gets annoying and can cause Google web crawlers fits)