How to balance usability with SEO

Heading tags (“H1,” “H2,” through to “H6”) are another useful element for both usability and findability. A good heading tag includes important keywords that relate to the copy underneath — explaining what it is about, as well as providing cues to the reader that enhance the page's readability and scannability. I would not repeat the page title as your H1 tag because that looks over-optimized. I would also be wary of using more than one H1 tag on a page.

Here's a way to gauge whether the search engines are likely to look askance at your use of heading tags: Imagine taking all your heading copy that is wrapped within heading tags on the page and creating an outline out of it — indenting the H2 headings underneath your H1 headings, your H3 headings under your H2 headings, and so forth.

Then imagine you are still in school and you have to hand it in as an assignment. If you'd expect to receive an “F” on your outline, then you haven't done a good job for either your users or the search engines and you should start again. The search engine algorithms are smart enough to sense that your use of heading tags is contrived and unnatural, and they are likely to penalize you for it.

A general rule of thumb for SEO: Anything that looks unnatural or engineered will be noticed and scrutinized by the engines and could get you in trouble with them.

For example, creating a link network with other companies that you are friendly with — and sticking a big pile of links to all of them in your footer, which in turn all link back to you — will look a little too symmetrical and engineered to Google. And, consequently, it won't give you the rankings benefit that you were after.

Similarly, the exact same anchor text in links to your Website from numerous sites doesn't look like it has developed organically.

Stephan Spencer (sspencer@netconcepts.com) is founder/president of natural search marketing firm Netconcepts.

Where to start?

The most important elements for you to add to make your site more usable for human visitors and search engines alike are:

• Unique title tags for each page that incorporate good keywords and are succinct and not repetitive

• Succinct heading tags that further reinforce the keyword theme of the page

• A well thought-out internal hierarchical linking structure that passes link juice to your most important pages

• Anchor text containing good keywords, not throwaway phrases like “click here” or “read more”

• “Alt“ tags that succinctly describe what the graphic is and what the button does

Creating these things will put you well on your way to high rankings and better usability.
— SS