It is no longer enough to have a site online and live. And it is no longer enough to optimize the site for various search engines. Certainly, you must make it simple for your prospective customers to find you on the web; however, as soon as they land on your website you should give them an experience that is welcoming, responsive and user-friendly.
If what the site visitors see once they arrive is an unpleasant looking and hard to navigate website, they may probably leave your website. So even if you have optimized your site properly for search engines, if all you need to showcase is a poorly designed site that makes user experience difficult, all your efforts will be worthless.
A lot may be said of the way the layout and design impact the way people use it. If a site is either too void or too cluttered of functionality, then they will not find it reliable. Web design entails caring for how the target audience will think about the site rather than just exerting creativity for the sake of creativity. Design, in general, is an exercise in empathy within creativity that is similar to walking a tightrope while juggling knives.
Experts call this entire thing user experience or UX. By learning how users interact with an interface, you are able to offer a better UX through using great design principles and integrating features, which help with that experience. Currently, that is a major part of SEO as search engines have determined that the usefulness of a website goes beyond just its content. For that reason, site owners and designers should focus on several UX factors to build and maintain good SEO.
Page Speed
It appears like a few people do not pay enough attention to the site’s performance, and it is essentially the most critical part of user experience. There is nothing worse than having to wait for a page to load, and it is truly awful when it takes quite a long time. It surely makes your website unattractive, especially for users who value speed in their surfing experience.
Google definitely hates it when your website loads slowly, that is why your SEO is affected. Do whatever you can to increase the load times of your website, for instance using a more simple design and using smaller file size images. According to Marion Jones, an Internet marketing Consultant the fewer elements the web browser has to download so as to make the page show up, the better it must be.
However, do not make it so simple that your website has hardly anything. Simply do away with what you do not need and you should be all right. If the site still loads slowly, then it is time to consult your web hosting. If they are unable to offer quicker loading for your site, then look for a better one.
Intuitive Website Organization
The layout is an especially key element of the web design, which cannot be easily measured. It is all about the feel and look that helps site visitors know what goes where, and easily tell between one element from another. Cluttered layouts confuse site visitors and keep them from receiving the most from your website. However, that is not the only factor associated with website organization.
Your website structure and the way it organizes its content is essential to the user experience, not to mention to SEO also. The general guideline to stick to here is to not have site visitors take more than two clicks to look for what they need. Your content must not be hidden within the depths of your site; there is always a way you can keep them neatly organized even if your site has a lot of content.
Make sure you have a good search feature, which allows users find whatever they might be trying to find and have an easy navigation bar, which links to as much of your website as possible without requiring complex multiple option and sub-menus. Your content management system must be able to handle many of these issues by cataloging them by tags, date, and category.
Also, you need to be diligent in placing your new content in the proper categories, allocating the correct tags, and providing them good titles. The format of the permalinks must also be descriptive and SEO-friendly also. These are a few of the things you can try out to maintain intuitive website organization.
Mobile Responsiveness
Responsive design is increasingly popular nowadays in web design. The reason behind this is clear; most web users nowadays are on mobile devices. So, websites that do not have a responsive design that adapts to any kind of platform views, it might be downgraded due to poor user experience.
However, there has been some debate on this subject recently. The “classic” method of delivering sites to mobile is to have it detect whether you are using a desktop or mobile device after that redirect you to a mobile version of the site if it is the latter. The issue is that it may have a different URL that might not be that great for SEO.
So, rather than having a separate mobile version of the site, include web code that changes the layout when you switch to a different screen resolution or use a mobile device. You would then consider such things as media queries in CSS e.t.c. to attain responsive design and never having to get it done the old cumbersome way.
User experience must never be underestimated, and it appears to be like lots of people are catching on to just how essential it truly is.
SEO ranking factors and analytics such as bounce rate, page views, and others all point towards the UX. By improving the user experience, you ultimately improve your SEO at the same time. It is important that you concentrate on these primary factors and you will see your website’s statistics get better to the level where you would like them to be.
