posted by Fabrizio Di Carlo on Me & The Web, SEO, UX

2 comments

About Fabrizio Di Carlo

I am student of Engineering, thinker, wannabe startupper and geek. Founder of Progettiamo.eu, Co-Founder of Startuppi and Co-Founder of 14th Hall.

I always thought that a website is made for people and not for Search Engines, and this has always been my guideline. I recently had a discussion with someone who thought that SEO was just a matter of Keywords, so I decided to write this article to let you know that you can have the most optimized site (on-site optimization) in the world but if the contents are not accessible, the site is slow, or something like that then all the SEO work is useless.

Since the advent of Web 2.0, off-page factors like Social Media (and the user-generated content) are becoming more important and is very crucial for a company to manage their aspects especially because through LSI algorithms the Search Engines (and their spiders) can measure very accurately which documents in a corpus are really relevant with a search phrase even if the phrase appears in a document. Measure the relevance is a key component in an algorithm for sorting the results of a Search Engine. Now I’m trying to explain, and compare, which SEO and UX factors may bring benefits to a site.

Keywords research

Keyword research is a practice used by SEO professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the Search Engines when conducting a search. SEO professionals research keywords in order to achieve better rankings in their desired keywords. From UX side keywords are used to improves conversion, comprehension and is more likely to resonate with those users who are looking for those words.

On-page factors

• Title: For SEO is most important on-page element because keywords that appear in these fields are thought to be good indicators of overall content relevance. For the user, instead, title is used to understand in which page we are (think if you have, like me, 9-10 tabs of Chrome opened);
• Headings: Second most important on-page criteria, bring more weight to the contents and are used to summarize blocks of content, from a User perspective Headings break up information into meaningful chunks of information, improving the speed of searching and scanning documents;
• Content (1/2): Put most important content above the fold because some spiders have an indexing limitation and text at top of page given more weight. If you use inverted pyramid writing style (Conclusion first, then 1st supporting topic, 2nd supporting topic) because Users scan from top to bottom you can increase chances of being scanned by user;
• Content (2/2): Provide updated/new content, this provides new opportunities to target new keywords, you can have page of internal links to boost internal link popularity and crawlers come back more often like Users that have a reason to come back to website and you have a possibility to open up more communication channels with users;
• Alt Tags: Images should to have keyword focused, descriptive Alt tags; this approach allows the Search Engine to understand what keyword phrases the link is relevant for, and also allows users without image viewing capability to understand what content the link points to.

For this first part is all, next time I will talk about Off-page factors, Social Media and other little things to improve the UX of your site.

Tags: algorithm, algorithms, comprehension, conversion, headings, keyword research, lsi, page element, relevance, research keywords, search engines, search phrase, search terms, site optimization, spiders, user generated content, ux