Tips for Deciding Which Words to Use on your Website

Language is an important part of website design

As our usability guru, Roxanne O’Connell is fond of saying, the cardinal rule when deciding on which words to use to describe the various departments, sections and categories on your website is to ask, “What would a user call this?”

Not “What do the business people call this?” or “What does the boss call this?” …or worse “What made-up marketing term can we call this?”

The only words that count at the end of the day are those that your intended users associate with what they are trying to find at your site. And there are a couple of ways you can find these words.

First, use what you already have. If you currently have a website, go to your search logs. This is a treasure trove of search terms visitors to your site use because the words you have on your homepage don’t help them find what they’re looking for.

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You can also use keyword generators like Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool to help you identify keywords that folks use at the big search engines. This has the added advantage of helping you improve your search engine optimization because those keywords, when they are part of the navigation, be it persistent or contextual, count for more than they do in simple content and will help improve your organic search engine rankings.

For more on website usability and search engine optimization, join us at the next Mequoda Summit.

For more on choosing which words to use on your website, stay tuned for tomorrow’s Mequoda Daily, which will feature Card Sorting as a technique to understand how users organize information into clusters.