Chapter 14 looked at Site architecture, Crawl Ability and Canonicalization. We looked at what impact these three elements have on your SEO and how it is that you can enable that your customers and search engines can have a good search experience every time they visit your website.
In the next chapter (chapter 15), we’ll be looking at how Usability, Experience and Content can enable you to achieve successful SEO, or if not applied correctly get penalized by search engines.
When is the last time you did an internet search on something? Now think of your experience while doing that search. Was the website content engaging and informative? , what the website easy to open and navigate? Would you visit the website again? These are some of the things search engines and humans consider when rating/ranking your website.
Let us look at what usability and experience are all about and why it is important for as a business owner have to familiarize yourself with them.’
What is user experience?
User experience is the experience carried out by a person using a website or computer application. The main thing behind it is to see how user-friendly your website is and how the overall website visit was.
Now let’s see what usability is.
Usability refers to the user-friendliness of a man-made object. This can be your physical product, software application, a website or page, a book etc… The object should be simple, easy to operate and follow.
Why is it important for you as a business owner to know about how usability, experience and content and how it will affect your website?
It is important for you to know about your customer’s experience on your website as you can always improve on certain areas .i.e. content, navigation, speed, keyword research, layout (graphics and content) etc… SEO is an on-going process, concepts and practises change all the time. Therefore, things such as usability, experience and content build on the relationship you have with your customers but most importantly dictate whether they will visit your website one again or not.
We’ve looked at what both usability and experience are about. Now let’s take you through how you can create user experience and what encompasses a ‘great search experience’.
What makes a good website experience?
– Understandable: The first thing you need to do is make sure that the information you have provided for your customers is understandable. Therefore it’s better to keep things simple and straightforward. Your website should be laid out in such a matter that enables the visitor to know where they should begin to navigate your website and where it ends as well.
Actionable: The whole experience has to involve an action. If your SEO strategy revolves around profit, you’d want your customer to make that sale. If it’s about publicity or promotion then you want good them to speak well about your product or service. Whatever the aim behind your website’s existence, an action is to be evoked. Your job is to make sure you’re creative in making it happen.
Engaging: Not only does the content of your website have to be good but the visitor needs to feel an interaction happen between them and what is displayed before them. As much as graphics and videos are great attention grabbers, too much of them can make the visitor lose interest in the website as after a while their attention will just shut-down. So always make sure that you enforce good content first and then the other ‘fancy stuff’ can follow.
Efficiency: This basically summons everything up as having to work ‘side-by-side’, bringing things together. In order for your website to be efficient it has to be able to segment the different visitors according to their needs. Someone looking to purchase a car on your website will not have the same emotional reaction as one who is searching for job opportunities on your website.
These for elements make up what a good-user experience entails. But what about content, what effect does it have on page ranking.
Why is content an important factor in website ranking?
We’ve covered the importance of content on your website several times in previous chapters. But just to recap, search engines now more than ever are emphasizing the importance of valuable, informative, content and hence have created very strict algorithms .i.e. Google Panda and Hummingbird. Your customers and users in general when visiting your website are looking for something, and whatever content you have has to answer that question, and answer it well. If it doesn’t, then they will automatically go to another website in the hope of fulfilling their need to their ‘problem’ or answer.
That’s covers content. But what impact does usability have on your website rankings? Let’s find out…
How can usability have an impact on your website rankings?
Search engines rank your website for the following usability factors. Therefore you have to make sure that you optimize your customer’s website experience as much as possible. Here they are:
– Your webpages should load fast: Nobody wants to wait forever for a webpage to load! Make sure that your webpages load fast for both customers and search engines to be able to crawl easily on your website.
– Webpages should be easily readable: In order for users to have a pleasant visit to your website, make sure that your font and colour are visible. Website crawlers view white background text as hidden, therefore make sure that all your text is visible.
– The contents of your website should be systematically arranged: Your paragraphs, titles and headings should be clear and easily identifiable. This makes reading easy for both your customers and search engines.
– Your website should use the IMG ALT attribute throughout the website: This will enable for visitors to read the content attached to your images should the images be visually impaired or damaged. The same goes for search engines, if they are not able to make out what your image is about then they will pick up on the content attached to your IMG ALT attribute.
– For ‘Not found’ error pages, use the 404 one: Pages which cannot be found by the server should be in the 404 error page format. This is important as done correctly, 404 error pages assure that search engines index the correct pages on your website.
– The navigation of your website should be simple and easy: Easily traceable links make it easy for visitors to find content on your website and also, for search engines, make sure that keywords are included in your content in order for search engines to find it much easier.
– Make sure that titles on your website explain themselves before being opened: Your webpage titles should explain what the content is about before even being opened. Especially the title tag, you should insert keyword in it as it ranks well with search engines.
– Also ensure that your URLS have your keywords inserted with them: It’s easier to remember variables with less elements or digits with them.
With usability, experience and content just remember that you are the owner of the website. Hence you have the choice of having a stuffed website or one that allows the visitor a pleasant experience. Make sure that your content is always updated and valuable the entire time or you will end up with a website that is hardly visited and penalized heavily by Google for poor content. Follow the four practises of a good user experience; understandable site, actionable, efficient and engaging. And always make sure that your 404 pages are fixed or directed to your website in order for search engines to index you easily as well as your visitors.
