Why Google is your homepage

More than 80% of sites are initially discovered through Search Engines.

But don’t believe me, I got that stat from Forrester Research and Georgia Tech’s GVU Center User Surveys.

What does this mean?

What this means is that your home page is really not your home page, Google is.

Have you ever tried getting to deep content using your link structure? Meaning clicking from link to link to get to something 3-4 levels in? If your site is like most sites your usability sucks and it brings your visitors to tears. I know that on most of the corporate and e-commerce sites I am on, when I try to find a particular product or deep page I ignore their convoluted link structure and go straight to Google.

A great tool is to use the “site:” modifier in the search field. This works in Google, live.com (MSN), and Yahoo. What this does is limit your search to a particular domain. Sooo, an example would be:
“site:amazon.com harry potter”. The search engine will then limit the search string to a particular site.

Now, Amazon has a pretty decent search function. The search field is prominent, and has a dropdown for filtering search results. But many sites handicap themselves by having a retarded search function. Check out UCompareHealthcare.com (http://www.ucomparehealthcare.com/). Their search function has 4 search fields. What the hell? And just try to use their link structure: first it makes you pick a type of search: state, Specialty, or name. After that  it took me 5 clicks to get to a particular doctor. Shoot me now. I would much rather go to Google and do a search on: “site:UCompareHealthcare.com dr. lammoglia”. Gee, I immediately get 10 links that I can look through. Having 4 search fields in this era of Google breaks the first rule of usability:

“Don’t make me think.”

Posted on May 25th, 2008 | By: wangzen | Tags: Google, SEO Tips, Usability
Filed under Thinking about SEO

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