CEO Corner - Can you just SEO my website? Part 2

As a CEO or business owner, you have heard the term, SEO and you have your own connotation of the word.   I am sure our definitions are not the same.  My definition of SEO is to have a website made up of 5 properly planned and designed components.

The second component of SEO is the layout of the pages with special attention to the navigation.  Is your site easy to use and navigate? Can somebody find what they want? Do you make them jump through a bunch of hoops to get somewhere?  Let me pose this question.  How long do you stay on a website if you have difficulties navigating around or finding what you want?  Not long I bet.  Your potential customers are probably not spending much time on your site if it falls in this category.

So how does layout become 'optimized' . If a site is difficult for a person to follow with our ability to think, adjust and reason then how do you think a computer program is going to do with that same website?  Oh but a computer can figure everything out you say.  A computer is programmed by a person and it can only think with limitations that the programmer placed in it; it does not have free thought.  Concluding me to say if it is easy for a user to navigate then it will be easy for a search engine spider to traverse and catalog your site.  Layout and ease of navigation do not end there.  You need to make sure your site has textual links that let the spider traverse your site.  In your layout you also want to make sure that if a user enters your site via the home page that they will go through a minimum number of clicks to get to important data.   This means that you want links near the top of your page for places of import.   So navigation is not just a menu listing of links, it is also links within content areas of each page.   Your text links must be descriptive whether they are menu items but also in content.

Let's assume that you may have four levels of pages on your website.   You do not want all of your navigation to go from one to four and back. You need links that will jump levels and move up and down between levels.    The overall design trends have pages with a lot of links at the bottom of pages and this trend may continue for some time; this may allow you to get more links on a part to other areas of your website, however you need to have links toward the top of your page to the most important parts of your site.

Another important area of layout is readability and esthetics.  Are there all colors of text, some that is hard to read, many different sizes and generally unorganized multiple topics that make anything hard to follow?   All of this translates into a potential client leaving your site; and quick.  If you have multiple products and information  you need to break everything up into manageable chunks or pages.  If you offer only one product and it's a impulse buy item you could make a informercial type of site all rolled into one very long web page, but that is the exception rather than the rule.  Most sites have to tell a story, provide information for a multitude of products or services thus they are going to need multiple pages and to those navigation and layout are part of the SEO process.

So is your site easy to navigate and readable? Who says so? Is it members of your staff, customers or have you gone out and had independent people evaluate  it?