Super-Easy Ways to Immediately Improve Your SEO
Rankings
What comes to mind when you see the
term “SEO“? Where do you focus all your energy when you’re trying
to improve SEO ranking of your website?
Getting users to stay on your website
and interact with your content can boost your website’s ranking, and you can do
so by improving the user experience
and usability of your website.
What is website usability?
Website usability encompasses many elements of website
design, most of which are also tied to conversion.
Here are a few that can affect your website ranking:
·
Effectiveness: can users achieve their objectives when they land on
your website? e.g. Can they find the information they need, order the products
they desire, or contact the company for customer service?
·
Efficiency: adding to effectiveness is efficiency. Besides being
able to achieve an objective, how quickly can a user complete a task? If
visitors cannot find what they need effectively and efficiently on your
website, they’re more likely to navigate away. The shorter time they spend on
your website may have a negative impact on the SEO ranking.
·
Learnability: can users learn to navigate your website quickly? Are
the calls-to-action that are clickable consistent so visitors know how to
interact? When visitors spend too much time trying to figure out how to use
your website, they’re spending less time consuming your information or looking
at your products. Plus, when they can’t find what they need, it’s likely that
they will get frustrated, navigate away and never come back.
·
Memorability: can users re-find your
website next time they go onto a search engine? Repeat traffic can help you get
a Google ranking boost. Visitors may find your website and then navigate away
for a number of reasons. They may remember it later and try to search for it
again. Is the keyword associated with that particular search memorable enough
so they can find your site again?
·
Error Prevention: certain errors on a website can affect not only user
experience but also SEO ranking. e.g. A 404 Page Not Found error, a link that
says one thing but displays something else, or a broken link that is no longer
valid.
How does good website usability improve SEO ranking?
1. Useful, high quality, relevant content
“Dwell time” is the amount of time visitors spend on your
website and it can affect SEO ranking.
When you provide useful content,
visitors tend to stay longer on your website to consume the information and
therefore increase the dwell time.
Based on this research,
content between 2,000 – 2,500 words seems to rank the highest in search engine
results.
Although word count doesn’t rule the
SEO world – nobody will read your stuff if it’s not helpful to them – longer
content does give you the opportunity to provide more value, include more
keywords, incorporate more outbound links, and of course, get people to spend
more time reading to increase dwell time.
Another reason to create
highly useful content is that when visitors bookmark your content on Chrome, it
will improve SEO ranking of your website in Google.
2. Page load speed
Both Google and Bing take page-loading speed into account in their
website ranking algorithm.
Users may leave your site if they have to wait even just
an extra few seconds for each page to load. That would hurt your dwell time,
increase your bounce rate and reduce the number of pages viewed – all of which
could hurt your SEO ranking.
There are many ways to increase page load speed, some of which include using a
caching plug-ins, making sure the code is clean and streamlined, optimizing image sizes, reducing the number of plug-ins, and
minimizing redirects.
Properly optimizing images can
help reduce file size and improve load speed.
Research has shown that using good quality images can increase conversion
rate.
Properly optimizing your images can help you take advantage of using photos to generate empathy, increase
trust, and improve a visitor’s experience without hampering load time which
could affect your SEO ranking.
3. Image optimization
Besides image file format and sizing, there are other ways
to make sure your images are working hard for you on the SEO front.
You can signal relevancy of your content to search engines by using keywords for your image file name, alt tag, title,
description and caption.
4. Header tags
Nobody likes running into a wall of text.
Good formatting of your content helps improve the user
experience of your website tremendously. It makes readers more willing to spend
time to read your content and come back for more, which will ultimately signal
your relevancy to search engines.
Proper use of header tags can help break up your content
into sections that are easier to read and utilize.
It’s easy to insert header tags in WordPress to improve
user experience and improve SEO ranking of your website.
5. Outbound links
To make your content more useful and relevant, you can
link out to authority sites for more in-depth information your readers can use.
Linking out to well-respected authority sites will not
only increase the relevancy of your content and time readers spend on your
site, but it is also believed to send trust signals to Google and improve SEO
ranking.
However, more is not necessarily better. Too many outbound
links can be distracting and make the content hard to get through
6. Different multimedia
Images, videos, slideshows and audio can help enrich the
user experience and allow you to deliver information in a way that is most
suited to your ideal site visitors.
They also act as a signal of quality content to search engines… after all, you have
put in the work to make your content look good and interactive!
Video marketing has become an increasingly integral element in
driving user engagement and conversion. It’s found that websites using videos can achieve a 4.8% higher conversion rate,
compared to a 2.9% average on websites that don’t use videos.
Videos get visitors to spend more time on a website and retain
more information.
7. Broken links
Who wants to get a 404 page after clicking on a link?
Broken links make for bad usability.
Not only that, search engines consider a large number of
broken links as a signal of an old, neglected site and this can impact your SEO
ranking.
Thankfully, you don’t have to go through every single page
on your website and test the links manually. There are many tools and apps to
help ensure that your site is free of broken links, such as:
8. Readability
Even if you have a well-educated audience, they probably
don’t want to be deciphering a PhD dissertation every time they visit your
website and read your content. You don’t want them to give up reading your
content and click away because it’s too difficult to digest.
Making your content easy to read and understand helps make
it useful to your readers. Some experts also believe that Google takes
readability into account when ranking webpages.
You can use a variety of tools to test your content’s
readability, including:
9. Layout and formatting
Proper formatting and a user-friendly layout can help
improve user experience and make your content easy to scan and digest, so your
readers will stay on your site longer and consume your website’s information.
Formatting can help dramatically improve a webpage’s
usability by making the content easy to read:
·
Use
font size and typography that are easy to read.
·
Use
bold type and colors – sparingly and strategically – to call out important
information and make the content easy to scan.
·
Use
short paragraphs and ample line spacing in between – nobody likes a wall of
text.
·
Use
bulleted or numbered lists for clarity.
·
Use
techniques such as sliders, tabs, progressive layouts, structured grids, modal
windows, rollover elements, accordions and mega drop-down-menus to organize
content and add interactivity.
·
Break
up content into sections with subheads. Proper use of header tags that include
keywords also helps improve SEO ranking.
10. Contact us page
According to this Google document (p.98), websites that have
sufficient contact information are considered to be more trust-worthy and
therefore may rank higher by search engines.
Including a Contact Us page on your website and putting
the link in the navigation not only makes for good user experience (especially
if you have an ecommerce site) but can also potentially earn you some Google
juice.
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1 comments:
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