By Pandia Guest Writer David Murton

Killer business plan with low overhead, plenty of demand, and a large customer base for your product or service? Check.

Great team of employees coming together to market, ship and service your product? Check.

Great website designed by your cousin that your mom guilt-tripped you into hiring because he just got out of that halfway house and really needed a fresh start in life? Check. And… um, uh oh.

‘Uh oh’ is right. For those of you who missed the memo, website usability impacts your site’s search engine rankings and those rankings, by extension, impact whether you will pursue your dream of an online business fulltime or will have to keep that tedious day job.

So, assuming that you wish to pursue your passion in a remunerative manner, here are some helpful hints to follow.

Don’t Neglect the Importance of Anchor Text

Often colored differently and underlined, anchor text is the link which connects a particular page to other pages on the web. For example, if you were starting your own web-based business and wanted to know about cPanel, a Unix based, graphical website management tool designed to simplify the process of hosting a web site, you could simply click on cpanel here and be whisked by the computer fairies inside your machine straight to the relevant information.

Anchor text helps search engine determine the relevancy between source and targeted pages and you want to keep those search engines happy to keep your rankings high. Also, since Google uses anchor text as a factor in calculating a site’s ranking, it’s best to use your desired search terms as your anchor text.

But it’s not just the search engines you keep happy with good anchor texts, users will appreciate it as well. Accurate and informative anchor text helps visitors understand the site’s content while skimming and, properly laid out, will keep those visitors browsing through your site for longer.

The keys to remember are that search engines will judge the main topic of the page by the anchor text that links to it and that customers will expect to find on the page exactly what the anchor text suggests that they will find. (And pretty much right in front of their faces – above ‘the fold’ as it were – without having to scroll around on the screen!)

Keep in mind, the better your website serves people’s interests, the more links you’ll have coming to your site and the higher your rankings, and sales, will go.

Make Sure Your Site Map Is Clearly Visible

A clearly visible site map is another key to good website usability and higher search engine rankings. A site map performs two major functions: one, like a You-Are-Here map at Disney World, a site map allows your users to quickly orient themselves to your website’s many attractions; two, a site map clearly communicates your website’s content to crawlers, the automated programs that follow through your site’s links to help gauge its rankings.

To facilitate this, you want those higher rankings, make sure to organize your content efficiently, making sure your information is no deeper than three clicks deep into the site as crawlers sometimes have trouble going any deeper.

Also, a good site, one with lots of article categories and sub-categories, can make it much easier for your users as well, saving them a lot of time and bringing them back to your site again as a reliable place to get what they need. Don’t forget, search engines are designed to rank sites according to how well they provide visitors with what they want. Well-organized content is good both for business and for bots.

Good Web Usability Will Help Your Back-link Profile

Back-links are the Internet equivalent of applause. They are the incoming links from another website leading visitors to yours. The number of links is significant in that it helps determine your site’s search engine optimization rankings.

Therefore, just like more people naturally want to visit a restaurant that is neat and clean and the service is good, more people will want to link to your site if it’s orderly and efficient and provides people with what they want. Quality breeds quantity and quantity, in turn, can breed higher quality.

The result, if you play it right, is to have your site listed on popular directories, higher sales, and more free time to devote to your business rather than having to spend time cleaning up a convoluted website.

Going Mobile

And just when you thought you had it all figured out, like The Who’s air-conditioned gypsies, we’re all going mobile and now your website has to take that into account as well. Remember that your search rankings are tied to good web usability and that many of your users are moving like so many molecules in Brownian Motion.

Therefore, keep it simple. Every pixel counts on a mobile device, so reduce your content to the absolute essentials on your site’s mobile-optimized version. This means that single column layouts will work best. Your visitors will have to zoom in to read anything and more than one column quickly becomes confusing.

Also, make sure to add only essential content and, when you do, make sure that that information is accessed by scrolling down rather than across. As for navigation, make that the job of your homepage with no content at all. Save that for the pages that the navigation on the homepage takes you to. (Also, make sure to have a search box so visitors can type in their own keywords to get to where they want to go.)

Finally, remember that, unless you’re a teenager, typing text on a mobile phone is much more difficult that a keyboard; anticipate your visitors’ typing needs and keep them to an absolute minimum. For example, let customers check out with stored details – entered automatically from a previous order. Another good suggestion is to let customers use a PIN instead of a password as the latter, especially ones that are case sensitive, can be a true pain even on a full-sized keyboard.

With these and other good website usability strategies, you’ll maximize your chance of making your online business a successful reality and waving that day job ‘so long.’

David Murton has been helping companies build and maintain their online relationships with customers since 2006. He is also a professional writer and blogger, with a particular interest in the open source Drupal platform. On a more personal note, David is an avid piano and accordion player, drawn especially to music of the classical and romantic periods.