Text Aesthetics and SEO: A Balancing Act

When it comes to choosing words for a web page, the content strategist follows a few basic rules, including:

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• Keep it short, as physically reading electronic text is more difficult than printed text.
• Use clear, concise, friendly language telling users what you want them to know and do.
• Make text scannable, so users can quickly find what they’re looking for.

Usability maxims like these are easy to follow, and good examples abound. The issues that keep content strategists up late at night, however, are much more insidious. Take, for example, search engine optimization (SEO).

The basic principle behind SEO is that site meta information — the details you’re telling the internet about your site — should match actual site content. The better the match, the higher search engines will rank your website.

For those readers who aren’t web-savvy, meta information includes page titles, descriptions, link text and alt tags. Site content includes a lot of things, but we’re most concerned with machine-readable text.

Here are three cases where web writers must balance good usability and good SEO:

1. Page Titles

An optimized page title contains not only the page name, but keywords for content on the page. This often leads to convoluted, sentence-length titles — which are neither short, concise, friendly nor scannable.

How HC&B does it: We often opt for clear, pleasing titles over “optimized” titles.

2. Link Text

Optimization tells us that text in a hyperlink — i.e. the actual clickable words — should describe the content of the page to come, not the action we’re taking in going there.

For example:

Learn more about aortic heart stents!

“Learn more” is the action the user is actually trying to accomplish. But because the page is about aortic heart stents, the link text should say “aortic heart stents.”

How HC&B does it: We follow the SEO guideline, as in the example above. For short sentences, we sometimes opt to make the whole sentence a hyperlink.

The Swedish Medical Center referral applet uses text and button types to give a hierarchy to user actions.

3. Buttons vs. Text Links

Search engines read text links better than button text. The problem is that button “text” is not usually text at all, but part of the button graphic. While buttons are tagged with meta information of their own, text links provide more data to recognize and categorize.

Buttons do a few things for usability: They stand out on a page. If they’re well-designed, they look clickable. They tell users what to do next. Aesthetically speaking, it’s easier to make a button attractive than a text link.

How HC&B does it: We balance the use of buttons and text links, with buttons having “action priority” over text links. While SEO does not often figure into these decisions, we ensure that all buttons are properly tagged with metadata.

A Final Word on SEO

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science, and the agreed-upon “rules” evolve on a regular basis. A site that regularly appears low on a search ranking usually suffers from:

• Large-scale, systematic errors in optimization.
• An unusually crowded field of search competitors.

While the issues discussed in this article may move the needle in one direction or another, they won’t generally lead to catastrophic failures or phenomenal successes. When grasping for search results in a crowded field, err on the side of SEO. When usability and presentation matter more, make that text look pretty.