Functionality before Optimization – Web site Hierarchy of Needs
In this day and age we are all anxious to get our Web site up and running and then market the heck out of it, but before you do ask yourself a few of these questions:
1. Is your Web site functional?
2. Is your Web site accessible?
3. Is your Web site usable?
If you are saying yes, yes, yes – are you sure about what these questions really mean to your site. If pages aren’t loading correctly, alt tags aren’t present, fonts aren’t user friendly, etc. Then your real answers might be no, no, and no. Before jumping head first into optimizing your site and marketing your site you must first have the basic foundation in place. Whether you are creating a new Web site or a Web site redesign it’s important to do some research and strategy initiatives first. So that when the time comes to market your site you can feel confident that every visitor/customer that comes to your site is going to have a satisfactory visit and accomplish the task they set out to.
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I would argue that all these things are part of optimizing your Web site. SEO in it’s purest form is just making a Web site easy to navigate and figure out what it’s about.
That’s why easy to follow navigation, keyword rich internal links and good titles are all SEO best practices. Same goes for using an HTML site map. It’s just another way to make things easy to find for SEs or visitors.
SEO and usability go hand in hand.
Tony, great point. I totally agree with you. However, my point was really to make sure you’ve got the basic foundation in place and that it is stable before doing any type of marketing. If site visitors come to the site and are not able to find what they are looking for, are frustrated by broken links and redundacy that is a problem. And yes, usabiliyt goes completely goes hand-in-hand with SEO. Build a an easy to use and easy to navigate site and you will be in good hands both from a search engine perspective and a visitor perspective.
Fantastic document, well crafted I must say.
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