Accessibility is the Key to Optimization
There are various ways of defining accessibility. To most people, it means making the website easier to navigate, read and be understood by those with seeing or hearing disadvantages. While it is agreed that all web designers should strive to make all their websites in this manner, for the purposes of this article, we are going to be talking about another angle of accessibility.
There are many schools of thought on what is the ideal number of choices that should be presented to a reader of a site. Too many choices may just confuse your reader, and too little content might just project the wrong image of not having enough quality content. There is no magical number that will tell you what the exact number of choices will be. That number should be determined by what the site has to offer.
If you visit ESPN.com, they have a excess of choices - in fact at the moment there are well over 300 possible links to click on - and that does not include the roll-overs if your mouse hovered over "NHL" or any of the other major sports.
Since ESPN is more of a portal, it makes sense that they would have to have so many links - they cater to just about every sporting event known in existence to mankind. Hence, they need to provide the appropriate number of links so that any visitor can find the topic they are looking for.
Now, if you visit Nike.com, the home page loads up a flash movie, and it has a total of around 5 links found on the page. There are 4 regional choices for the user (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America). Once you select your region it opens up a window where you would be shown a site that you would expect from a shoe retailer – giving detailed information on sizes, models, colors, etc.
Since Nike is not trying to be everything to everyone, their site calls for lesser options - so that the visitor can focus on what they came to the site for.
So how is all of this related to SEO/SEM?
Traffic from Google can surely bring you hundreds of visitors, but if they can't find what they are looking for, you've wasted valuable time and energy getting that visitor to your site.
So many times a website fails not because they were not able to get the potential buyer to the website. They failed because the website did not make it easy for the visitor to find what you promised them when they clicked on your listing.