“If you lived here, you’d be home now”

The natural process of a neat search engine optimization has to keep in mind two things:  keywords and ease of navigation.  I know I’ve stressed the point to almost awkward levels:  your customers are people, not machines.  Some web designers tend to forget that we, the average joes, get easily confused.

If you need to know (you probably don’t, but it makes a good anecdote), last weekend I spent a good share of time wondering why my cellphone wouldn’t work until I realized that it wasn’t my cellphone…

It was my TV’s remote controller.  Makes you humble in a silly way, huh?

We get confuse easily.  Some of us more often.   That’s why having clear URLs is key.

Look at the Bright Side!

Let’s face it:  Life, while full of rough patches, is easier than it used to be.  You don’t have to hunt down your lunch, you don’t have to wake up every morning to build up pyramids and it’s definitely a relief to know that your weekends won’t be ruined by a sudden outbreak of Black Death or polio (or a horde of barbarians, Mongolian troops, blitzkriegs…) .  See?  Life is swell!

I’m refraining from writing down the only downside to this constantly-improving quality of life… but…

We’ve become lazy.

We’re SO Pampered!

There’s always a button that does something for us, instead of us and better than us.  Yes:  Technology made our lives easier, but we can no longer be bothered to change the channels without the remote controller and an evening at home turns into a feud whenever the crucial and life-risking decision of who will receive the pizza order is made.

We are lazy people and technology made us even lazier. If we can be spared from a chore, that’s always good news.

You Only Reap What You Sow…

In that order of ideas, we expect our sites to be easy to follow.  Not until relatively recent times, web navigation  was based on completely unintelligible web URL addresses.  Fortunately, web browsers made things easier for us and, greedy as we are, we want it easier.

It comes to this:  If you have to keep your customers jumping through loops in order to get information on how to buy your products, they will be easily discouraged and unwilling to make businesses.

Plus, complicated or impromptu URL addresses are bad, bad SEO news.

How Can it REALLY Bite You

Three major issues arise here:

1.  Search Engine Nonsense:  Search Engines take into account your URL addresses to rank the relevance of your site in terms of contents.  Sure, to the techies out there, an address like “http://www.thismakesnosense.com/blablah/post.php?action=97678589780667587690878765789878764″ or something like that makes perfect sense.  But, to the rest of the Human Kind, it makes no sense, no matter how many times you explain it.

2.  Think of the Little People:  Can you remember your mobile phone number?  Ok, that one was easy… Can you remember your locker combination when you were at school?  If you can, then I admire you!  I think mine was 18 right, 25 left, 9 right…

… and how come I can’t remember when am I supposed to go for my jacket at the laundry?

Our attention span is worth squat.  If you make easy-to-follow web sites with understandable URL’s, things will make more sense.  People will like you more, you’ll feel healthier and, most of all, you’ll get customers.

3.  Design über allez:  I have to make a confession here:  I SUCK when it comes to build Ikea furniture.  I can’t join part X with Part Z without feeling that there are five pieces left.  I can’t even begin to imagine how it’s like for web designers to build up a site with no guide.

SEO makes things easier for us.  Instead of running after our customers, they come to us.  Don’t we owe them some gratitude?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 9:02 pm . You can leave a response.