SEO, UEX, and the Googlebot

How does usability and user experience affect SEO?

Usability and user experience have a second order influence on SEO. This is because links dominate ranking factors, but if your website is user friendly, it is much more likely to get shared, bookmarked, revisited, or linked, thus increasing your PageRank. When developing your user experience and mapping content for SEO, keep the different kinds of search in mind.

Search Intent Types for Understanding User Mindset

1. Navigational Search

• "I know the website I want to go to, but forget the URL"
• e.g. "American Airlines flight check"

2. Informational Search

• "I just want to fact check"
• e.g. "who sampled sweet child of mine"

3. Commercial Investigation

• "I want to know where I can find info about a product/service"
• e.g. "best digital camera"

4. Transactional Search

• "I want to buy a cool lighter"
• e.g. "cheap unique American lighters"

What SEO tools and services increase correspondence with Googlebots?

• Sitemaps (XML, RSS, .txt): These help spiders crawl your website by displaying your site hierarchy.
• Robots.txt: These serve as an access guide to search engine robots, letting them know where they cannot go, where they can find sitemaps, and how fast a robot can crawl the server.
• Meta Robots tag: This tag creates a set of page level instructions for search engine robots.
• Search Engine tools: These tools help you understand the way search engines are interacting with your website and allow you to monitor your indexability - Google Webmaster tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Center, SEOmoz Open Site Explorer.

Please contact your SEO team if you’d like to know more information about how these questions affect your bottom line.