Is Google So Hard To Find?

How difficult is it to perform a search on Google? Usability expert Jacob Nielsen posed this question in the March 17, 2008 edition of his weekly e-mail newsletter Alertbox.

Apparently the process of getting to the search engine -- not the act of performing the search itself -- was unattainable for 24% of the participants in Nielson's latest round of usability research. That's a big number.

So what happened? Were the users asked to type in the domain? If the testing was done recently this pesky little site may have been an issue. I would highly doubt that the participants had any knowledge about top-level-domains.

Nielson offers little information about how the study was conducted. The one point he did make was that his team was "recruiting above-average users, so the success rate across all Internet users is probably lower than our finding." Says Nielson:

On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task.

A VERY simple task. I recently wrote about Google's redesign of their advanced search page. In that post I said that most users don't fully understand how a search engine works in the first place.

The implications of this study could be huge. What does it mean for Web developers, designers, etc. if we learn that the average user still doesn't know how to use, for instance, the Web browser. If Google is so hard to find, what does it mean for the rest of us?

The Importance Of Clear Hyperlinks To SEO and Usability

When I took Web design 101 almost a decade ago my professor told us nothing about how important it is to not only include authoritative and direct hyperlinks in the text on our sites (that is links that not only link to a company's Web site, but to the area of a reputable entity's site where the product or service being discussed is displayed).

Today, users expect clear hyperlinks. "Click here" does nothing to:

• Provide the user with information and/or a service in a timely manner
• Increase the SEO of the site
• Encourage the user to navigate to other areas on the site
  

But writing clear hyperlinks is no easy task. As writers it requires us to step outside our creative thought process and go back to the research process to think of the terms we used when we were creating that very same story.
So while I am speaking of writing text for hyperlinks, I am going to refer to the basic prinicple of writing for the Web, which I think is best explained by the great usability expert, Jakob Nielsen. The first duty of writing for the Web, Nielson says, is to write to be found.

Some of Nielson's tips:

• Precise words are often better than short words, which can be too broad to accurately describe the user's problem.
• Use keywords that match users' search queries: Queries are typically 2 to 3 words long
• Supplement made-up words with known words: It's tempting to coin new terms because you can own the positioning if the term catches on. But, more likely, people will continue to use their old terminology.
  

Getting back to hyperlinks. Jagdeep.S. Pannu, Manager of Online Marketing at SEORank, a leading Search engine optimization services company says that the hyperlinked text is actually searched by Google when its spiders crawl the site every 15 to 45 minutes or so. Here is what he had to say:

"The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. All search engines that matter, give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages. In fact Google even has a special operator: ‘allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. This further implies that Google’s algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate queryable data, thereby making it evident, that Google considers it an important pointer to page relevance. Our internal research leads us to believe that weight given to anchor text has been raised recently in the Google algorithm. With these changes, it is possible to enhance your website’s ranking by using the right keywords in anchor text."

For the purposes of news writing, I believe it's important to keep Nielsen and Pannu's advice in mind, but here are some of my tips.

• When linking to another story always use the headline. Topical headlines are searchable, so readers are more apt to find them in search engines. And by using the headline in the hyperlink, you will naturally describe the story before and after the link, therein providing the user and search engines with keywords that will clue them in to the nature of the linked text.
• When linking to a company drill down as close to the product or service as possible. If the company has released a product, link to the page for that product--not to the company's home page.
• When referring to a report or white paper, link to it by name. Google the paper and find the proper name. Doing so will be of great use to the reader and to the site's SEO.

Google Employee Gives Advice About Best Uses of Flash

We've all been taught that Google is, in essense, a "blind user" and I had heard that it couldn't search for the content contained in Flash, so I have always recommended against using it in page designs. However, I am hearing that Google is making an effort to search Flash content (or at least the content surrounding the flash design), so when I saw Mark Berghausen's post, "The Best Uses of Flash," I was intrigued. He says:

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn't have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn't currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.


Berghausen recommends:

1. Using Flash only where needed: This is a recommendation the great usability expert Jacob Nielson has been touting for ages (Check out his article "Flash: 99% bad." I can't recommend his work enough.)


2. Using sIFR for to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements. I disagree here. As a strong advocate of usability, I don't think that bells and whistles like flash or their counterparts should be used for textual elements for a variety of reasons. One is because of the critical nature of those textual elements to search, especially the header. If a designer uses flash or sIFR to display a header it is not likely that they will display that element again as text because in most cases it will not be aesthetically appealing. But this is what needs to be done for that element to be properly picked up for search. Another reason is that a flash element slows down the speed that the page loads. Visitors today have high demands when it comes to viewing pages, and when it takes even a couple moments for a page to view, or worse the page has loaded and another element or elements is still loading, visitors exit. Additionally, as more and more visitors "information snack" having content available in those first few seconds is critical because those visitors especially are guaranteed to stay on your site for only a few moments before going on to another domain.


3. Non-Flash Versions: Flash used is as a front page "splash screen" where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. This recommendation seems to make sense for the designer who absolutely insists on using flash and the developer who is assured that their audience has the hardware and the internet connection to load the page speedily enough that they won't depart because the page loads so slowly they leave as a result. And becayse the page links to HTML deeper on the site SEO remains intact.