Optimizing Your Medical Website for SEO and Speed

Posted: Feb 10 in Usability tagged Usability best practices by Ines

It’s a common misconception that if you optimize your website for SEO purposes, the usability of your website suffers. Many people also believe that creating a usable website for your visitors hurts web page optimization efforts geared toward higher search engine rankings. Fortunately, nothing is farther from the truth. By making your site more user-friendly, you can easily optimize your website for SEO at the same time because most of the strategies go hand in hand.

Avoid Frames
Website optimization companies will tell any web designer to lose the frames; it’s an old way of doing things that worked well before the web became smarter. Frames hurt SEO because most search engine spiders can’t follow links through the frames. Usability suffers because navigation between pages becomes extremely stressful when frames are used.

Use CSS
Cascading Style Sheets help SEO because:

• It cleans up the code, which makes it easier for search engines to read
• It results in more content and less code
• Important content can appear at the top of the HTML document.

A medical website optimized with CSS sees an increase in usability as well because the pages of the site load faster, giving the visitors what they’re looking for without having to wait for the page to load.

Avoid Short Content
The content of a web page should be at least 200 words. Any shorter and the visitor will likely have to click elsewhere to find more information on the subject. Having to continually click for more information is a usability killer. Likewise, the search engines will view this page as not containing much information. If the search engines feel that the content is thin, the page will not rank well in the results.