Familiar words aid findability
In his latest Alertbox entry, Jakob Nielsen shares his findings that you are more findable on the web by using familiar words and phrases. For example, if a user wanted to search for a spade, they’d sure as hell enter “spade”, not “digging implement”, and less so “excavation solution”.
So the lesson is “call a spade a spade”, right? Right. Well, almost.
My favourite point is one he makes about avoiding prissy PC language; this has no place in SEO and benefits no one. No user would search for “partially sighted” or “visually challenged” – they’d get right to the point and simply go with “blind”.
These are valuable lessons we’ve recently learned at Futurelab during our website redesign. The former site had several top-level nav elements with terms such as “showcase” and “viewpoint” which it transpires most of the outside world don’t understand.
Our further lesson learned then – which is to ignore, as far as possible, your internal structure and phraseology when constructing your website – listen to what the users actually search your site for and gear the architecture to their expectations.
Categories: Futurelab, Web design, education
