Warmest Greetings,

When Search Engine Optimization and Usability Clash  

:: Friday, May 14, 2004 ::

An interesting article in WebPronews by Garrett French about title attributes caught my attention. In it, he says someone in the WebProWorld forums claims to have gotten word from Google that putting text into hyperlinks, via the use of a title attribute tag, "will improve optimization."

I've seen discussions about this before and haven't seen proof that title attributes enhance organic optimization. If it did, I would be concerned. Why?

Because title attributes are intended to assist humans, not search engines. Someone with a screen reader can be "told" where a link goes, or where an image is located. In some cases, as in the example shown in this WC3 Recommendation , a title attribute is used to explain that a link is an image.

I have applied the use of link attributes to text hyperlinks because they will appear on mouseover in some browsers. I had some fun, likely to the expense and frustration of some of my web site visitors, with silly comments in the title attribute tags of some links on the Cre8pc homepage. For example, if you mouse over the text link in the main body content for the link to this blog, in some browsers you will see the words "Cre8pc's extremely popular blog. I know you don't believe me."

I'd love to know what, if anything, that bit of nonsense text does for my page rank.

The risk of spreading a possible myth that title attributes might help with SEO is that this could be abused. The first thing I can think of is some people will stuff keywords into title attributes, trying to add more "weight" to the page on a certain subject. Can you imagine how distressful it will be to special needs users who rely on text only computer use or software that reads pages to them, to come across a string of keywords and phrases?

I have much to learn about making web pages accessible. Their needs matter to me as a web site designer and user centered thinking person. If you are a web site user who relies on user agents, I'd love to hear from you about your experiences.

When a Fan Meets A Hero

It's been quite a week here for me. Two of my articles went out this week. One is rather advanced and stretches the brain muscles, and the other is basic and practical. I got up the nerve to introduce myself to John Rhodes, the man behind WebWord, a site I've been a fan of for years. I gabbed on and on in my Kim-fashion, and mentioned a new toy we have at Cre8asiteForums where we collect certain site feeds and set them to automatically dump into subject related areas of the forums. Since I moderate the Usability section of the forums, I chose to let WebWord's blog posts pop directly into Cre8asite as well. To make a long story short, John joined the forums and a new friendship has begun.

I keep wanting to send him a baseball to sign or something - I'm SUCH a fan of his web site.

He found a sticky post I had started last year about International usability and posted about it in his site. I'm happy he chose that one because it had been sitting idle for awhile. It's a thread I started so we could get input and suggestions from web users and designers around the world about how to improve the International usability of web sites, and especially forms and applications like shopping cart processes.

In a comment made to an entry from the other day, the poster, "ChrisR", asked if I'd heard of Bryan Eisenberg. Indeed, yes! Bryan is another person I admire and learn from. What he did for me was give me the proper terms to express what I've been finding, and especially not finding, in my work testing web sites. There are several people passionate about persuasive web design, desirability, engagability, and the other sexy words we're hearing about that zing many of us want for our web sites. Bryan's newsletter and articles (and his book) are always among my favorite things to read.

UsabilityEffect.com

Remember the new web site I said I'm building? It's nearly done. Well, most of it. One large section isn't started yet. But, I expect to roll it out next week. Part of it blows up in Netscape 7.1, but Opera loves it. I'm still a hand coder and the design and everything that breaks is all mine. There's a nice "To Do" list for it, of nifty things I want to add. The goal is to have my own usability site. Cre8pc has long been about SEO, and then I added usability topics to it, then Cre8asite related topics. Now, at least, one of my web sites will not scream "I'm a Gemini!"

Successful Sites

The latest free issue of the Successful Sites newsletter is out. The theme is "Getting More Results Out of Your Site". You can also read my article for that issue called You Had Me At The Search Engine.

     "You've likely heard of the movie, Jerry Maguire, with its famous line, "You had me at hello." Jerry Maguire was luckier than web sites we find in search engines. Many web sites don't attract user devotion at the first word, let alone after scanning the home page."

I'm sure there's a lot more news, but a girl has to do some paying work once in awhile too. Thanks for your continued support of this blog. Think peaceful thoughts. The world needs them.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 5/14/2004 12:19:40 PM

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