online, UXD is one quarter SEO and one quarter IA
Search defines the web. Jakob Nielsen estimates that only 25% of users are traveling through sites via the home pages. If you had any thoughts about ‘forcing’ users through preset paths, it’s time to put them away for good. To be successful in the web medium, I would suggest we need to be simultanously enabling the ability of the search engine bots to crawl and comprehend web sites while also enhancing human users’ ability to identify their position within a site’s structure and their ability to navigate quickly through that structure.
If people can’t find your pages, then it doesn’t matter how good a job you’ve done keeping the navigation obvious and intuitive. Likewise, the net result of driving a lot of people to a lousy web site is a lot of alienated customers, which is not a result most companies want to spend money achieving.
I was recently talking with a client about the merits of featuring their service offerings in their primary navigation. One of the SEO strategists at my firm, the able lieutenant of an emerging leader in the field, observed that having accurately-labeled links to the client’s core service offerings on the site’s pages would likely have a positive impact from a search engine perspective. The decision to include those links on every page (though not necessarily within the navigation) was suddenly self-evident.
If we want to be considerate of the people using our site throughout the entirety of their engagement - if we’re serious about trying to fulfill upon the vast promise of the ‘user experience design’ label then I think it makes sense to include the folks who make it their business to understand the search engines dominating that experience.
