Justifying Paragraphs and SEO

[georjo]

Hi,
Webmasters always are keen on making the sites optimized for both crawlers and humans. Considering the human side the concepts like limiting the colors, paving black lettered text on a white background for the ease of readability are their. Yea agree to all this..

But the paragraphs within most of the high page ranked blogs and websites found in WWW are not justified. Eventhough justifying the text in the pages gives the site a nice and clean look they are not done. A commonstyle is unjustified text even with the masters like Google,( ) and Wiki..

Where the matter comes? Do an unjustified paragraph has anything more with SEO, or to save the time to justify!! or is it a casual standard out there?? Justify or not to!! what you think??

Regards
Georjo
Junior SEO

[latha]

While performing all the so called SEO tasks, people (the readers) are ignored and forgotten.

The ultimate aim of a website is to give a satisfying experience to the visitor (NOT search engine). We want the visitor to be able to read, to understand and stay longer on our site (sticky content).

User participation is also encouraged via blogs, forums, tell a friend, comments, share an idea, share an article, share a coupon, share a photo ..

The Google webmaster Blog looks OK to me. I prefer no images, ads and clean pages.

If you think a certain alignment will help visitors have a satisfying experience then you must use it.

I always try to make sure that my paragraphs are small, exciting, enticing and full of information, no fancy fonts. Legible is my key !

[Mike]

Latha, this basic principle is lost on many development companies. They become obsessed with the SEO side of things to the point where sites become very user unfriendly. A balance needs to be struck, and that long tail of SEO practices mentioned in Elan's thread adhered to religiously. What good is a site if it's ranked #1 and has a bounce rate of 100% because it's ugly or dysfunctional?

Mike

[latha]

Very true Mike. Seen so many such sites which were so ugly & with terrible grammar & not to mention the advertisements. Clicked out sooner than I clicked in. User friendliness is very very important, that's why Youtube, Twitter are exploding.

Twitter is so bland (acc to me), but look at it's popularity .. It's clean, it gets work done, & people love it.

[Prashant]

An interesting debate going on... The final conclusion however way people express their opinion is a sites success is a combination of SEO/SEM, Design, Functionality/Usability. There isn't fixed ratio for these and will vary upon the nature of the site and the purpose for which it is being used. Most Social Networking sites would be less flashy or simple and can be classified under UI designs, The reason being more than the site design it's the functionality that needs to be higlighted and also at the same tim enable the user to use it easily. Most of the sites are interactive sites.

A point to be noted is even in marketing a caption speaks louder when matched by a image expressing it. It invokes better response. But on the down side you overuse it, your caption may get drowned and the whole purpose looses its objective. So in short Balance is vital. i have read several articles online and also personally belive the fact that a image portrayinng people / facial expression on banner does engage users more..

Anothe thing to note is, It's always good to provide information. But one needs to plan how to express it in a way which will keep the reader engaged throught the information provided. Content shoul be short and to the point, supplemented by bulleted points for easy grasp. Use quotes for emphasis and so on.

Above all the main purpose of the website and the people it caters to should be understood by each person who is a part of developing the website.

[georjo]

hi collegues,

Thanx for the involvement in the thread.

I have just come across an article regarding the readability of justified and unjustified ones.

Let me share.