This is the debate that has crossed the mind of every online marketer. What should they go for to make their website popular: sacrifice usability at the altar of SEO or vice versa? Before coming to a conclusion, it at all, let us look at both sides of the same coin from an internet marketer’s point of view. Suppose you have a website. You want people to visit this website. In order to make that possible, you need to look at an SEO plan for your website. With great effort, you build up the SEO machinery that works for you.
After fighting a grim battle with the keywords and the search engines, your website is ranking well, probably on the very first page of search results on all your primary keywords! You have attained SEO nirvana, so to speak! The results are there to see: a steady stream of online traffic flowing in every day, hundreds (even thousands) of unique visitors every month. However, when you look at the conversion ratio, you find it to be abysmally low. You dig for reasons and find that users are not enjoying their experience of being in your website. The bounce rate is so high because they have not bothered to click anywhere. In fact, they stayed on your website for some seconds!
Why is your well-laid plan falling apart? It is because your website’s usability is low. Online visitors hate to stay on at a website that is cluttered, full of broken links and confused navigations. It could also be that users are repelled by that Flash intro you have which you think is a delight but your users think it is a bandwidth consumer! It’s time, then, to introspect and fix these usability hurdles. In other words, SEO will not get you dividends if you neglect usability. Similarly, the inverse is true as well. You have an excellent site and your content has the perfect keyword density, but unless you have a proper SEO plan to bring in users, your website will wither away. SEO and usability are not choices for an internet marketer: both are a necessity.
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