Website usability is the key to a healthy, productive website and happy customers. Because a site that lacks focus, uniformity and usability can undermine the main goal of your website, it’s important to take a step back every now and again and ask yourself whether or not your website is truly working.

To do this, you’ll have to step into your users’ shoes.

This can be extremely useful, and may help you find answers to questions that frequently plague webmasters and business owners, such as:

Why do so many purchases get abandoned in the shopping cart?
Why is one page/product so much more popular than another?
or
Why is my bounce rate so high?

Ready to look at your website with fresh eyes?

If you’re ready to take a critical look at your website, take a step back and pretend you don’t know anything about your business. Maybe you have a question related to a certain product or service; or maybe you, like your users, have come to a particular page after performing a search for a keyword.

Whatever the case, it’s important to look at your site from a few perspectives. Take a look, for example, at the homepage, an interior page, the contact page, and the shopping cart.

From the homepage ask:

• Where does your eye go? (Are these the things you want your users to look at? Why?)

• Are you able to quickly ascertain precisely what it is the business does?

• Are you able to easily find what you’re looking for? (From the search bar; the page links; and the header and footer navigation.)

• Is the messaging (both visual and textual) targeted to the core audience?

From an interior page, ask yourself these questions:

• Does the second-level navigation make sense?

• Do the calls to action make sense?

• Are you offered links to additional, similar content?

• Does the breadcrumb navigation help you understand where you are?

From the contact page, ask yourself:

• Are you offered several ways to contact and “follow” the business?

• Are you given an idea of what will happen after you attempt contact?

• Are you offered any “next steps” after filling out a contact form?

• Are there things on this page that might not belong? (Calls to action, 2nd-level navigation, etc.)

From the shopping cart, ask yourself:

• How many clicks does it take to complete a purchase?

• Do I have to sign up, or can I check out as a guest?

• Am I able to calculate shipping costs early in the checkout process?

• Am I offered time-saving payment options, such as a saved credit card number or the ability to use PayPal?

• How long does it take to check out, from beginning to end?

By looking at these aspects with fresh eyes, and an open mind, you will be able to see whether or not your website’s tools, content, and organization, is truly doing what you need it to do: engage your customers with useful content while moving them seamlessly from introduction to conversion.

If it’s not, it may be time to take a step back and begin to think about how you can reorganize your website and retarget your content to make the most out of every pair of eyes that finds your site.

Relevant search results are the results given back within a search engine for a specific keyword or keyphrase that a searcher would look for.  They are a representation of how many pages (not websites) on the web are considered related by that specific search.  These results have many uses, which include helping a business understand if a certain keyword or keyphrase would be worth spending budget on to drive qualified visitors.

An example of a relevant search result would be searching for the word “movies”, compared to “comedy movies”.  Search for both of these on Google, here are the results that are returned:

You can see in both of these shots, that the relevant search results are 3.6 billion and 449 million respectively.  Obviously, it makes sense that something as generic as “movies” would have a lot more relevant results than “comedy movies”, but we can take this a step further.

Let’s look at “Will Ferrell movies for sale in Cleveland Ohio” and compare it to “Will Ferrell movies for sale in Akron Ohio”:

If I was a retailer that focused on selling movies in Ohio, I can then compare competition between these major cities, or find more niche words that do not have as many competitors.
Additionally, every search engine would give back a different number of relevant search results based on their algorithm and how they qualify content as “relevant”.  For the keywords we researched above, here are the results returned by Bing:

Quite a few websites make use of pagination to distribute products or content evenly across multiple pages. Pagination is essentially the distribution of on page content across multiple pages. This can provide good user experience on many sites which might include blog or product categories. If these category pages have too much content to realistically fit on one page, spreading them across multiple pages can be a smart choice.

There can be serious SEO issues with this however. For one, ranking and indexing signals such as inbound links might be diluted across all pages instead of accumulating on the most important page in the series. This can keep the main page from ranking as well as it should be. Second, if you have some static content such as a descriptive paragraph on every page, pagination can cause duplicate content issues.

These problems have been run into across many websites, and Google has created some solutions. First, if your website or blog has an article which is broken up across multiple pages, the recommended solution is to implement rel=prev and rel=next tags on each page. These will inform search engines that the pages are in a series and should be grouped together. More from Google about this action can be found here.

The next example would be if you have a blog with categories, and you have so many posts within each category that they cover many pages. If your blog appends a parameter to the URL on each page such as page=1, page=2, page=3, then you might run into issues where links become created to pages with no content. This could be seen as page=133 when you only have 10 pages. If this is a problem with one category, it is very possible that this will happen to multiple categories and it is important to address early. The best solution is twofold; however it is important to be very careful with this solution. If you are not technically knowledgeable then it is recommended to contact your webmaster or an expert.

First, create and verify a Google Webmaster Tools account if you do not have one already. Next, go to “parameter handling” under the “configuration” tab and click on “configure URL parameters.” This will lead you through the steps necessary to keep Google from crawling your paginated pages. Make sure that you know exactly what parameters are being appended to your website’s URLs which are causing the pagination issues. Finally, it is also recommended to implement the rel=canonical element on each page which is not the first page in the series. Each canonical element should point to the first page in the series. More on parameter handling from Google can be found here.

Once again, it is very important to make sure you have the technical knowledge to implement either of these suggestions. If you incorrectly implement parameter handling, it can keep Google from crawling and indexing important pages. If you implement correctly, it can save Google from crawling unimportant pages and serve them only the pages you wish do well in the search engines.