7 Things That Matter Most in a Website: The SEO Perspective

SEO Meme-Game of ThronesSo I'm going to guess you've heard about SEO before. Probably through spam mails that (still) claim to give you #1 rank in 3 days.

 

And I'll not be surprised to hear if you've fallen for some, ending up having a terrible, terrible experience. That's because, like any other industry, there're bad apples in our industry as well.

 

But I somewhere believe that if you've been duped by an SEO, it's your fault too.


“How could you say that? They promised us great visibility across search engines in a matter of days and they eventually did succeed – except momentarily. Anyway, where's our fault in that?”

 

I'm really glad you asked. :)

 

In fact, today I discuss 10 most important things in a site from the SEO perspective so you know what to look for next time you go on investing in SEO.

 

Navigation

When your site navigation is friendly for both search engines and users, it shows – in your bounce rate, rankings and conversions. Some common mistakes that companies easily fall for:

  • Home page with way too many links (Ideally you should have no more than 100).
  • Flash/Image based navigation (Google can't crawl it so go for HTML).
  • No-followed internal links (do-follow all your internal links – except those like live chat).
  • No usage of the secondary breadcrumb navigation (this not only helps the user move around your site easily – it helps search engines understand it better).
  • Meaningless URLs (for those who don't know, URLs are used to compute rankings too).

 

Content

Ask any SEO (literally, any of them), their most important SEO metric would be content related. In fact, content marketing is the new SEO for many out there.

 

But what content does it take to attract users and search engines alike? Is there any magic potion?


You might expect there's one, but in reality there's no magic potion. But sure there're some things you need to take of:

  • Engagement (your audience loves to engage, react to your stories and exchange ideas with you so why not make the most of it).
  • Intent (so that you can give users what they're looking for and where they're looking for it, hence enhancing what we like to call user experience).
  • Keywords (surprising, right? Keywords are dead and never will be. It's keyword stuffing that makes things look spammy. So do include relevant keyword/s in your URL, page title, body text, meta description and even alt attributes … and sometimes in internal and external links, too).
  • Panda (refrain from using duplicate content, spinned content, thin content and focus only on providing valuable, share-worthy content).

Curious to know how to do content marketing remarkably? Here're a couple of posts that might help:

 

Page Speed

Though Google doesn't consider this as a high-impact ranking factor, it certainly makes a difference in your overall page views, conversions and ultimately revenue. Studies after studies have proved that.

 

In fact, as much as 40% of your visitors will abandon your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, a study has established.

 

Mobile Friendliness

Google recommends responsive design. Unfortunately, this statement is most misinterpreted in our industry. The reality is that Google doesn't mind if responsive design is not okay with your business model and you rather need a dedicated mobile site.

 

But it does want you to give your users a site that's well-optimized for mobile. I've covered this at length in one of my articles from March – A Guide to Improving eCommerce SEO and User Experience.

 

Authorship

Authorship not just protects your work on the Internet – it helps you build trust and reputation and gets you more click-through-rate (CTR) through those headshots in search results. So claiming authorship has become more of a necessity than an option.

 

Social Proof

In some years from now social may be as important as links (if not more). As of now, some researches have showed that the no. of tweets has a direct connection with rankings, whereas the impact of the number Facebook Likes is still not very clear.

 

And one of the best parts about optimizing social is, if your content is shared more, it'll be linked more – which we all know is the most important ranking factor today.

 

User Satisfaction

Now this is an easy mistake – one that most businesses fall for. One that successful businesses exploit the most. And you should, too.

 

Ensuring that your site loads fast, building an intuitive navigation, optimizing your site for mobile and developing content for Web readers (who scarcely read) are some ways of satisfying users. Some other ways are:

  • Giving a guarantee of your product/service and proving it.
  • Embracing pay for performance model.
  • Removing pop-ups (note: pop-ups do work for some businesses).
  • Answering their questions, giving them what they want and surprising them with something unexpected.
  • Testing what works best for you.

 

Hope this helps you get the most of SEO – and your investments.

 

Author bio:

Ruchi Pardal is Director of ResultFirst, a digital marketing firm that cares deeply about what its clients are getting from their investments. You can get in touch with her over Google Plus, Twitter or Facebook.


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Gary

CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.