Usable Words

(This is the first in a series of posts about how people use the words on your website.)

Here’s something about writing for the web that’s totally unique. On the web, whether people can find you or not depends (in part) on the words you write. To be exact, it depends on how the words you write relate to the words they type into a search box.

As a word geek, I find this fascinating. The ancient art of rhetoric – to which every copywriter owes his or her livelihood – is about using words based on how you think people will behave. You predict that pressing certain verbal buttons will trigger the behaviour you want. So you could say that all of us in the word business use language in predictive ways.

But I can’t think of any other word-based activity that’s so specifically, mechanically predictive about human behaviour as writing search engine optimised (SEO) content. (SEO is about a lot more than content, actually, but content is a good place to start.)

I emphasise human behaviour because from my point of view, SEO writing shouldn’t be understood as “writing for search engines”. It should be understood as writing for people who use search engines. So although my “optimised for human beings” tagline is a bit of a dig at people who focus on search engines at the expense of human beings (and there are plenty of them out there), that doesn’t mean that I think you should ignore search engines!

How SEO helps your customers

It’s pretty simple really. People use search engines because they have needs. You can fill some of those needs. Therefore, you should try to make yourself easy to find by the people whose needs you can fill. Optimising your site for search engines is like getting a shop on a busy street and hanging a sign out the front. Nobody is going to complain about the fact that you have a sign…in fact, they’d complain if you didn’t!

Optimising your content doesn’t have to mean making it less readable or less usable, either. For instance, one of the most basic SEO tactics is to build lots of internal links in your site, and use your keywords as anchor text. (Anchor text is what people click on to follow a link. This is anchor text.) Google likes links (it prefers them coming from other people’s sites, but internal links are better than nothing), and Google treats anchor text as more important than other text, so this is an SEO double-whammy.

(Incidentally, I’m afraid that’s the only actual SEO tip you’ll get in this post. If you’re interested in knowing more about SEO, I’d recommend Naomi Dunford’s ebook, but unfortunately she’s stopped selling it. In the meantime, check out this brief introduction from Aaron Wall, who knows more about this stuff than pretty much anybody.)

But done properly, using keywords as anchor text for internal navigation is great for usability, too. Backing up your global navigation menus with in-text links gives users multiple ways to find their way around; that’s a good thing. And using keywords as anchor text (if you’re doing in non-abusively) gives people useful information about where they’re going. Also a good thing, and almost always preferable to “click here”.

It’s not all sunshine and roses

So SEO and usability can go hand in hand. That’s the good news! Where SEO becomes a problem is when people focus so much on having an eye-catching sign that they forget to put any actual goods in the shop. So I’ll always encourage people to think about SEO as something you do once you’ve got something on your website that’s worth seeing. The only reason I’ve put it first in my series is that it comes first chronologically from the customer’s point of view.

Some people don’t care so much about having decent content because they’re only in this to make a quick buck (from affiliate links, or whatever). They think that if they can drive a lot of traffic to their site, they’ll get enough morons clicking “buy now” that they don’t need to worry about having actual content. That’s called webspam and it relies on exactly the same principle as email spam. It’s a short term strategy because eventually Google catches up with these people and punishes them by blacklisting their sites. You didn’t know Google could do that? Hey, Google can do anything they want.

Of course, none of my readers are spammers so none of that applies to you. But what you do need to be careful about is scammers higher up in the supply chain – people who want to charge you a small fortune to “submit your site to over 1,000 search engines” (hint: the number of search engines that actually matter is pretty much 1, and you don’t have to submit anything to that one), or who promise to get your site on the front page of Google within two weeks (hint: can’t be done, at least not for any decent keywords). Here is a very useful list of SEO scams. I suggest you read it before you hand over any money to self-proclaimed SEO gurus. (N.B. there are some actual SEO gurus out there who might be worth every cent, but that’s another topic.)

Coming up next in this series: How people use your words to decide you’re not what they’re looking for. (Or, less frequently, that you are.)

Image: Mykl Roventine