Don't Forget the Humans

This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list to be honest. On the other hand it should be so obvious it probably shouldn't even be on the list at all!
There's an art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people you ultimately want to buy alpacas. Without people, what's the point? So first design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is a web usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling people how to make user friendly websites since the this whole web thing got started.

As an illustration ask yourself; How difficult is it to perform a search on Google?

Jakob is not talking about the challenge of formulating a good query, interpreting the results, or revising your search strategy to reap better results. Those are all very complicated research skills, and few people excel at them.

He is talking only about the very first step in searching the Web: Getting to your favorite search engine so that you can run a search there.

Would you say this is easy or difficult? Think a bit before reading on.

**** think about it ****

If you thought it's easy to get to Google, think again. In Jakob Nielsen's current round of web usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn't do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.)

Jakob Nielsen doubts that any Web designer would be incapable of running a Google search and I have to agree with him. So, the fact that 1/4 of users can't do it is a striking demonstration that you can't rely on your own experience if you want to reach a broader audience. Remember this when designing your web alpaca marketing site and when reviewing the work of others. If in doubt use unsuspecting friends and family to test out what you have produced, you will be shocked by the number of times what was obvious to you was not at all intuitive for your audience.

Next time you are sat in an alpaca meeting take a look around and it requires no imagination to believe that 1 in 4 of the people in the room don't know-how to use Google well enough to look for your adorable alpacas...... so bear this in mind when you build your web alpaca web site.