50 Web Usability Tips

Tony Williams — Sat, 19 May 2007 19:21:17 +0000

Web usability is something that many site owners don’t pay enough attention to, even though it can be the key factor that will make your users come back over and over again.

Maki over at DoshDosh has spent a considerable amount of time compiling a list of 50 web usability tips, which he’s even taken the time to categorize. The post also has a list of additional references so that readers can really through themselves into the topic.

Some of the tips I found most interesting were:

Remove the ‘homepage‘ link on the homepage because it can increase navigational confusion. This will make the user doubt that the homepage is indeed the actual homepage.
Follow conventions for web design (”blue for hypertext links“) This will allow site visitors to mainly focus on your content instead of using their mental power to learn how to use your website.
Simplicity is Rule #1 for usability. The less features there are available in a design, the less there will be to compete for the user’s attention.
Try to mainly rely on typography instead of bloated designs and graphics. The goal is to enhance appearance without delaying the response time. The blandest sites can get the most page views and users.
Change the color of visited links. This will allow users to decide where to go next on your website. Links that don’t change color can cause navigational disorientation in users.

To read the full list click here

List Of Search Engine Ranking Factors

Tony Williams — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:35:16 +0000

Carsten from Search Engine Journal has pulled together a summary of the monster Search Engine Ranking Factors document, which contained the opinions of 37 SEO experts.

If you’re pressed for time, then this is the quickest way to learn about Search Engine Factors or a quick reference guide to remind you of all the little things you should be including in every post in order to get more traffic for your site.

#	Type	Factor	Importance	Consensus
1	Keyword	Keyword Use in Title Tag	High	Yes
2	Site	Global Link Popularity of Site	High	Yes
3	In-Link	Anchor Text of Inbound Link	High	Yes
4	Page	Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure	High	Yes
5	Site	Age of Site	High	Somewhat
6	Site	Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site	High	Somewhat
7	Site	Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community	High	Somewhat
8	Negative	Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots	High	No
9	Keyword	Keyword Use in Body Text	High	Somewhat
10	In-Link	Global Link Popularity of Linking Site	High	No
11	Negative	Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index	High	Somewhat
12	Page	Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages	High	Somewhat
13	Site	Rate of New Inbound Links to Site	High	Somewhat
14	In-Link	Topical Relationship of Linking Page	High	Somewhat
15	In-Link	Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community	High	Somewhat
16	Negative	External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites	High	Somewhat
17	Keyword	Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)	High	Somewhat
18	Keyword	Keyword Use in H1 Tag	High	Somewhat
19	Page	Age of Document	High	Somewhat
20	Negative	Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages	High	No
21	Negative	Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links	High	No
22	Negative	Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)	High	Somewhat
23	Page	Amount of Indexable Text Content	High	Somewhat
24	Site	Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query	High	No
25	In-Link	Topical Relationship of Linking Site	High	Somewhat
26	In-Link	Age of Link	High	Somewhat
27	In-Link	Text Surrounding the Link	High	Yes
28	Keyword	Keyword Use in Domain Name	Medium	Somewhat
29	Page	Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically)	Medium	No
30	In-Link	Internal Link Popularity of Linking Page within Host Site/Domain	Medium	Somewhat
31	Keyword	Keyword Use in Page URL	Medium	Somewhat
32	Keyword	Keyword Use in H2, H3, H(x) Tags	Medium	Somewhat
33	Page	Organization/Hierarchy of Document Flow (i.e. broad > narrow)	Medium	Somewhat
34	Negative	Very Slow Server Response Times	Medium	Somewhat
35	Site	Historical Performance of Site as Measured by Time Spent on Page, Clickthroughs from SERPs, Direct Visits, Bookmarks, etc.	Medium	Somewhat
36	Site	Manual Authority/Weight Given to Site by Google	Medium	No
37	Keyword	Keyword Use in Alt Tags and Image Titles	Medium	Yes
38	Site	TLD Extension of Site (edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc)	Medium	Somewhat
39	Site	Rate of New Pages Added to Site	Medium	Somewhat
40	In-Link	Domain Extension of Linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc)	Medium	Somewhat
41	In-Link	PageRank (as measured by the GG Toolbar) of Linking Page	Medium	Somewhat
42	In-Link	Temporal Link Attributes (when in time the link was created/updated)	Medium	Somewhat
43	Keyword	Keyword Use in Bold/Strong Tags	Medium	Somewhat
44	Page	Frequency of Updates to Page	Medium	Somewhat
45	Negative	Inbound Links from Spam Sites	Medium	Somewhat
46	Keyword	Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag	Medium	Somewhat
47	Negative	Low Levels of Visitors to the Site (Measured via Toolbar, Clicks in SERPs, etc.)	Medium	Somewhat
48	Site	Number of Queries for Site/Domain over Time	Low	Somewhat
49	Page	Number of Trailing Slashes (/) in URL	Low	Somewhat
50	Page	Accuracy of Spelling & Grammar	Low	Somewhat
51	Page	HTML Validation of Document (to W3C Standards)	Low	Yes
52	Site	Verification of Site with Google Webmaster Central	Low	Yes
53	Keyword	Keyword Use in Meta Keywords Tag	Low	Yes

One Tip A Day » keywords

50 Web Usability Tips

List Of Search Engine Ranking Factors