1 )  Navigation

As I said, a web designer has to learn how to think the way your visitors think.

Situation A : Website with good navigation ( 2-3 hyperlinks to target page ), well planned  in terms of placement, and design.

Situation B : Website with poor navigation ( takes forever for the visitor to reach his/her target page ), hard-to-read navigation fonts and poor placement of the navigation buttons/bar.

In Situation A, a visitor will always want to be able to access his/her target page. For example, the individual comes across your website, and is interested in the product sold, but wants to find more information. He/she finds the navigation with no trouble, and enters the particular product information page.

As for Situation B, a visitor stumbles into the website, and would also like to find out more information about the product. Unfortunately, due to bad placement and fanciful font-types, the visitor takes forever, or even fails to find the navigation bar. Even when he/she does so, links to the product information are nowhere to be found, (example : home > about > products > product image > etc…[a few more clicks] > product information ).

Analysis : In both situations, wouldn’t a website with characteristics similar to the Situation A be more rewarding ergo better?

Search engine optimization isn’t about optimizing for the search engines, it’s about optimizing for the user – the ones that will be buying from you. You will often hear from us that a user-friendly website will do way better than a site that is hard to read and hard to navigate.

This is because search engines only care about what their users get when doing a search. If a user is unhappy with a result because of irrelevancy, then they’re not doing their job.

Here are a few examples of what you should be doing to be user-friendly:

• Use a simple navigation menu that can be easily seen. We recommend the menu be placed at the  top or right column.
• Be natural. Write naturally and freely without concentrating on specific keywords.
• Be relevant. Try to give each page a particular “theme” or “topic”. If your page is about “glass cleaners” try to talk about “glass cleaners” AND related items. Don’t stray off about “shoes” or “skiing”.
• Be professional. This includes the layout of your site, the design and exactly what the page is about. You want people to be able to easily read what’s on your page. Don’t use colors that clash or too close in color that they blend in.