Web site usability is the quality of a user’s interaction with a web site or, in other words, how usable a web site is to the user. Ultimately, users want to be able to easily access a web site and determine how to use it within seconds.

Usability influences whether many users will return to a web site, how often they will use the web site, and how happy they are with their overall experience at the web site. There are millions of sites on the Internet and they are all in competition for users’ time and attention. Users get their expectations for usability from the best of all of these other sites.

• Design is a key determinant to building online trust with consumers. For motivated users of an information site, bad design (busy layout, small print, too much text) hurts more than good design helps.
• Layout on a web page (whitespace and advanced layout of headers, indentation, and figures) may not measurably influence performance, but it does influence satisfaction.
• Experience matters: Blue links are easier to click than black ones, even though black ones have higher visual contrast and are easier to see.
• It’s important to consider the users when you have a choice of icons, links, or both. Initial performance is best with the link alone. Frequent users can use either equally effectively. Icons are not faster, relative to text links alone. –
• Rules of thumb for icons: Make them as large as feasible, place frequently used icons in a persistent task bar, and arrange them either in a square (first choice) or in a horizontal layout.
• The acceptance and impact of animation is enhanced when users are warned to expect it and allowed to start it when they want.
• Use of whitespace between paragraphs and in the left and right margins increases comprehension by almost 20 %.
• A format of 95 characters per line is read significantly faster than shorter line lengths; however, there are no significant differences in comprehension, preference, or overall satisfaction, regardless of line length. –
• Applications vs. websites: In general, visual layout guidelines for GUIs also apply to the web, but there are differences to be aware of. For example, dense pages with lots of links take longer to scan for both GUI and web; however, alignment may not be as critical for web pages as previously thought.
• Narrative presentation enhances comprehension and memory. Narrative advertisements produce more positive attitude about the brand and a higher incidence of intent to purchase.
• On sites with clear labels and prominent navigation options, users tend to browse rather than search.Searching is no faster than browsing in this context.
• Users will wait longer for better content. Users will wait between 8-10 seconds for information on the web, depending on the quality of the information.
• Consumer purchase behavior is driven by perceived security, privacy, quality of content and design, in that order.
• Users have clear expectations about where to find the things they want (search and back-to-home links) as well as the things they want to avoid (advertising).

Search Engine Optimization is vital for any business that decides to make its presence felt in the market through the Internet. However, when venturing out into the SEO world, it is important to choose the right SEO keywords and optimize them. Mining for the right SEO keywords may take a considerable amount of your time and effort, but the fruits of it will be rewarding.

First, it is important to understand the importance of keyword selection and how to use your keywords on your website in order to enhance your marketing strategy.

Keyword research is one of the most basic steps in a good search engine optimization design and without it all SEO efforts will be wasted. Also, it is important to perform a thorough keyword research before you start placing keywords on your webpage.

SEO Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the process of identifying a list of keywords and then selecting those keywords that accurately reflect your products and services. It involves finding out which are the most popular terms searched by Internet users, how widely they are searched and how many and which other websites run on those keywords.

It is also important to think in terms of how your target audience would search for products or services on the Internet. For instance, if you have a website promoting a golf club, then it would not make much sense for you to target keywords like “golf” or “golfing” because these keywords are extremely general and have tons of competitors. Also, since you are targeting only people who are looking out for a golf club, using a general keyword like “golf” will bring in a lot of irrelevant traffic. This is because visitors may be looking for anything related to golf, such as golf history, golf tips, golf news, and so on. Typically a person who is looking out for a golf club will type in “golf club” and related terms instead of the single term “golf.” So from this example it is evident that the best choice of keywords for you would be to use phrases like “golf club” instead of single and general keywords.

You can use keyword research tools (free and paid) that are available online in order to see what users are searching for. There are several such tools which contain data on search queries performed by users over a period of time. These tools will help you get an idea on the kind of terms that are searched for and also their frequency of search. Any keyword research tool will let you enter a word and show results on similar terms including variations, synonyms, misspellings, singulars, and plurals. Not only do these tools provide information on search volume but also show data on the advertiser competition for keywords.

Once keyword research is done and you have built your keyword list, these keywords can then be placed at appropriate places in your webpage content to achieve a high ranking in search engines. However, avoid placing too many on the same page as search engines consider this practice as keyword stuffing and may penalize your site for it.

SEO Keyword Tactics

Keyword Research will help you get the most popular, lucrative, and top SEO keywords which may be searched by thousands of users in a day. However, if there are several competitors for the keywords you have chosen, then it will be very difficult to beat those sites and get the top ranking in the search results. Conversely, if you choose keywords that are very specific or niche that no one searches on them, then top ranking for your site is wasted as there would be none to see it. The idea behind choosing the right SEO keywords is that they should help you achieve top ranking with reasonable efforts and budget. If your site fails to show on the first or second page of the search results then it would really not be worth the time and effort that would have gone in optimizing those keywords.

You will most often find that the best SEO keywords are already being used by a large number of competitors and these high volume keywords may be very tempting to use but may not always fetch you the ranking you desire. Therefore, the catch here is to fish out those keywords that have strong relevance to your website, high search volume, and relatively less competition because these keywords will be more rewarding than just high volume competitive keywords. It is quite possible to achieve a good search engine ranking while staying within your budget and with minimal effort using low volume less competitive SEO keywords when compared to high volume ones. To do this, you need to find out how tough it is to get a good ranking for a specific keyword and this can be done using keyword difficulty tools.