Intangible Factors At Play…
Website and blog design and user experience are increasingly becoming important factors, factors the search engines are taking into account when serving up search results. This being the case, it is not then surprising to learn that website design and user experience (UX) would indirectly affect the search rankings of websites.
As technology changes become more rapid and search engine algorithms become more sophisticated, design of a website or a blog and the user experience it provides will continue to become increasingly important as well. Search engine companies want the best websites and blogs to provide to their customers, i.e. the people searching for information using their search engines.
What Makes Good Design and User Experience?
So what exactly constitutes good website or blog design and what makes for a good experience? Well there are several things to consider and design elements to implement as described below.
Website Design
Professional appearance is of paramount importance. The website should contain all elements of good well thought-out website, including certain support pages such as a legitimate About page and a working Contact page. Using WordPress as a base platform you have access to hundreds of professional looking themes all of which are well written, conform to global standards, and are very well supported. Genesis Framework is a prime example of premium, professional WordPress theme.
The website should be accessible to all modern browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Websites and blogs should be accessible to mobile search devices such as smartphones and tablets.
The website should be easy to navigate. It is a good idea to make the navigation bold so that it stands-out from the rest of the web page. The navigation should include a way to always get back to the top of the page and also to the home page.
Website Content
The number one, most important element of the website content is that it has to be of a high quality, informative, and credible. If you think about it from a website visitor’s perspective, this makes complete sense. They’re looking for content that they can find easily, understand it, learn from it, use it to help solve problems, and buy based on recommendations.
If visitors find content useful in the manner described above, they will come back to your website and share it with others. This will inevitably lead to higher rankings and therefore usually more traffic.
As technology and visitor preferences change, and they are changing more quickly than ever before, videos, images, dynamic presentations are and will become even more prevalent.
Creating thoughtful, analytical, and valuable content is essential if a website or blog is to be successful.
Website Content Organization
Content needs to be organized in a way such that it is intuitive to the average website and blog visitor, and so also that it can easily be found. Content on the site should be strategically linked to aid the visitor in finding information as quickly as possible.
Set up categories, sub-categories, tags, and custom identifiers in a way that makes sense for the subject matter of the website. Properly segregate topics so that content looks structured and other related items can easily be accessed from within the subject area. Visitors, and search engines, should be able to reach content in as few clicks as possible. Always show the newest content first, at top of a blog if that component exists on your site.
In displaying and arranging content on a website, it is important to understand what constitutes duplicate content and the necessary steps required to avoid these issues. Duplicate content is an important issue to avoid because it can affect website and blog rankings.
Next: Read Website/Blog Traffic.
Revisit: Website/Blog Usage Tracking.
