The Ultimate Guide to Improving User Experience for SEO

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]User Experience (or UX) is a model that describes the satisfaction a user gains when interacting with your website. It can also be referred to as “user-friendliness”. The advantages of having great UX on your website are numerous, including the likelihood of increased links. To that users will spend more time on your site, share content and return regularly. Those are all good things for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)! This guide will help you understand some of the basics in improving your User Experience for SEO, starting with the mindset you need to have for success.

 

Table of Contents

• What is User experience (UX)
• Impact of UX on SEO
• Understanding your website’s visitors
• How can you improve your user experience

 

What is User experience (UX)?

 

 

User experience is the sum of all the interactions a user has with your website, from the first time they land on it to when they leave. User experience encompasses not only the way your website looks and interacts but also how easy it is for users to find what they are looking for, and how quickly they can complete their tasks.

User experience also includes your content, whether it be text, video, or images. The goal of content should be to help users achieve their goals by providing them with the right information at the right time; users should not have to wade through irrelevant or repetitive information just to get to what they need.

It’s no secret that search engines like Google use user experience as one of their ranking factors in determining where pages are ranked on their results pages. Unlike content or links, however, user experience is hard to optimize for directly because there are so many different factors that go into it.

 

Impact of UX on SEO

To understand how User Experience affects SEO and how to improve it, you must first know why it is important in the first place. There are several reasons for this, but the ones that matter most are the ones that directly impact your business.

First, a good user experience has a direct impact on your ROI. The better your site is at converting visitors into customers, the more money you will make. Conversely, if your site creates a poor experience for users, they will quickly leave and never come back.

Second, a good UX can improve rankings in search engines. By having an excellent user experience, you can easily draw users back to your site and make them want to share it with others as well.

 

Impact of UX on SEO" width="701" height="427" /> Impact of UX on SEO

 

Third, a good UX can greatly reduce bounce rates of your website which can also boost up your rankings in search engines. If users like what they see or read when they visit your site, they will be much more likely to stay and explore further since they are happy that they found what they were looking for on the first page of results.

Finally, we would like to tell you as a Web development service provider in Mumbai, a good user experience increases customer loyalty towards your business and increases regular traffic to your site. This happens because loyal users like coming back to sites that have a consistent design and layout that does not change.

 

Understanding your website’s visitors

It’s a great idea to think about the way your site is designed from the visitor’s point of view. To do this, we need to know who is visiting our site.

There are three types of users:

The first type of user visits your site because they’re looking for something specific. They want to buy a product or sign up for a service and they’re searching for the right place to do it.

The second group includes people who are casually browsing. They might be interested in what you have to offer, but they haven’t decided yet. Your task is to catch their attention and keep them on your site long enough so that they decide you’re what they’re looking for.

Finally, some people have no interest in you at all. It’s no use trying to attract this group, but it can be hard not to get distracted by them! If you manage to keep your focus on the first two groups, you’ll find that you don’t need as much time or money attracting them as you might think.”

 

How can you improve your user experience?

Here is a collection of 15 tips from an expert Digital Marketing Agency in Mumbai which will help you improve your user experience for SEO purposes.

The 15 tips are:

1. Write Clean, Semantic Markup

To write a clean, semantic markup you first need to know what semantic markup is. Semantics is the meaning of words and phrases, whereas syntax refers to the combined structure of words and phrases, as in a sentence or paragraph. In a sense, all writing is both semantic and syntactic.

For example, if you tell someone to “look both ways before crossing the street”, you are conveying meaning while at the same time using the correct syntax for a command.

The mistake most people make when writing web pages is to think they are writing web pages while they are links writing documents that just happen to be displayed on a computer screen rather than printed on paper. The purpose of most web pages is to communicate information—the business objective for which the page exists.

This information might be about products and services, people and organizations, activities, events, or any number of other things. It typically includes not only text but also pictures and other types of media content like Flash movies and even video.

The challenge for SEOs is to write web pages that convey their message as effectively as possible while also providing search engines with instructions on how best to understand what the information means so they can present it to visitors in the most useful way possible.

 

2. Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a phrase used to describe on-page content that is repeated across multiple pages on your site. Whether you have duplicate content or not will have a direct impact on the user experience and how search engines interpret and rank your site.

What Is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a phrase used to describe parts of your website that are duplicated across more than one page.

There are two primary types of duplicate content when it comes to SEO.

The first is duplicate content which is controlled by the website owner. This includes duplicate content that is created or intentionally added to a website. This includes things like:

• Duplicate copies of pages or images on your site
• Duplicate meta descriptions, titles, and keywords on your site
• Duplicate internal and external links on your site
• Duplicate author bylines on your site
• Duplicate Adsense ads on your site

The other type of duplicate content is more subtle because it’s not intentional, but still an issue for search engines. This is duplicate content that exists in the wild, on other websites that are not owned by you. This includes things like:

• Content copied from other websites
• Content scraped from other websites (even if only partially)
• Content republished from other websites (including guest posts)

Whenever you create or allow duplicate content that search engines can find on your site you devalue the importance of all of the pages and thus hurt the overall user experience for people visiting your site. Similarly, whenever you republish someone else’s work without permission (Copyscape, Scrapebox, etc) you devalue their work.

 

3. Don’t be spammy

Search engines have a strict set of guidelines for what they will and will not show in their results, if you want your site to rank high in Google or Bing, you need to follow their guidelines.

The links on your site should be relevant to the topic of your content. If your site has a blog then most links from that blog should be relevant to the topic of the post they are published with, but they can branch out into other related topics as well. This is different from having a block of links at the bottom of each page that links out to several unrelated websites.

 

 

If you want to be able to use anchor text in your links, you need to make sure that the anchor text is relevant and not spammy.

When linking out to another site, make sure you don’t use very similar anchor text for several different links. You don’t want those sites thinking you are spamming them, or it will hurt your rankings on search engines.

If you have many pages that are targeting the same keyword phrase and relating to each other in some way, then duplicate content may not be an issue for search engines. It is something else entirely for users though, as this can confuse them when they click through from one

 

4. Reduce Server Response Time

When a search engine crawler visits your website for crawling, it requests all the pages from your server. The pages are loaded on the visitor’s browser and the content is indexed. The length of this process depends on many factors including the search engine, the number of files that need to be downloaded, and the site architecture.

The Search Engine Optimization services providing experts do not agree on how much impact a slow server response time has on SEO rankings. Some say that reducing your website speed by 0.5 to 1 second can reduce your ranking by half or more in most cases. Others claim that while it is true, you can’t influence it much.

But many other reasons may prompt you to reduce server response time:

i. Reduce server response time to improve user experience

With the search engine optimization (SEO) industry booming like never before, every site owner is looking for ways to improve their user experience (UX) to get more traffic and make more money.

This article explains five ways that you can reduce server response time and improve the user experience for SEO. The five ways are:

1. Use a CDN service.
2. Move your content closer to the user by hosting it on a server geographically close to the user.
3. Move your content closer to the user by hosting it on a server with a low network latency to the user.
4. Use a faster web server.
5. Lose weight (code).

ii. Reduce server response time to increase conversions

Reduce server response time to increase conversions

First of all, the user experience is a key factor in SEO. It may not be the only factor but it does rank up there with content and links in importance. It is one of the biggest SEO factors you can take on yourself.

This article will explain what server response time is and why it is important for SEO. Then we’ll talk about how to reduce your server response time and optimize your site’s user experience for SEO.

Number one, let’s define server response time. The amount of time it takes a server to respond to a request from a web browser, which includes everything from actually sending out a data packet to receiving an acknowledgement that the packet was received.

What is the optimal server response time?

Research has shown that 250 milliseconds or less is considered the optimum response time for websites. Anything above that will start to see a significant drop off in conversions such as sales or leads or email subscriptions. So anything above 250 milliseconds you should be worried about and working toward getting under 250ms.

Two hundred fifty milliseconds is really fast when you think about it when you consider how big the internet is and how far information has to travel from your server to the web browser requesting data from your site.

iii. Reduce server response time to decrease bounce rates

Your bounce rate is defined as the percentage of users who leave your site after viewing just one page. A high bounce rate can mean a lot of things, from bad content to slow-loading pages, so it’s not surprising that there are lots of tips for decreasing it.

What most people don’t know, however, is that reducing server response time (SRT) will also help your bounce rate. That’s right: making sure your pages load fast will lead more people to stay on your site and read more pages.

What does this mean? If you want to decrease your bounce rate, you need to decrease SRT. In other words, if you want readers to stay on your site longer and read more pages, you need to make sure those pages load fast.

For some more detail on why this is true, let’s take a look at how Google views speed. Google doesn’t just rank sites based on what they are made of; it ranks them based on how fast the sites are (or are perceived to be). The better a web page performs, the higher in the rankings Google will place it. According to Google:

“A slow website loses 7% of customers due to poor performance.”

iv. Reduce server response time to reduce page loading time

It’s important to reduce server response time and page loading time. This helps search engines index faster and helps users find what they’re looking for faster.

You can improve your website user experience and search engine optimization by reducing the loading time of your web pages. This can be accomplished by reducing the size of the images on your website, optimizing HTML and CSS markup, following your, and using compression on all image, multimedia, and audio files.

The first step in improving user experience is to ensure that server response time is as fast as possible. The faster a user gets a response from the server, the faster they can see what they are looking for. Reducing server response time will also help you achieve higher rankings in search engines because it means search engines can crawl your site more often, which improves your ranking.

Reduce Server Response Time

There are several ways you can reduce server response time. The most effective way to reduce server response time is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

CDNs work by distributing your content across multiple servers around the world so that users get content from servers that are close to them geographically. This reduces the distance a user’s request has to travel. CDNs also cache any content that is not frequently updated so that if someone requests it.

We have already shared a few ways to optimize your site’s speed before, but today we are going to focus on reducing server response time only as it affects SEO performance.

 

5. Identify and Fix Broken Links

A broken link will create a bad user experience and is a no-follow link. This can cause problems for your website’s rankings.

The first step in fixing the problem is to find the link that is broken. Most of the time this happens because an old page was deleted or moved, but it could also happen because of a programming error. The easiest way to find broken links on your site is to use the Broken Link Checker tool from Majestic SEO.

This tool will crawl your site looking for broken links. You can set it up to only look at certain levels of your site, such as only looking at external links on your homepage or just looking at internal links within one section of your site. Once you do this, you can view all of the broken links found by clicking on the \”Download\” button at the top of the tool where it says \”View Results\”.

You can then export all of these links into an Excel document or similar file so that you can begin fixing them.

This tool will only find broken links on pages that already exist on your website, so if you still think pages are missing from your site then you should move on to find those pages with a site search.

 

6. Focus on Mobile Devices

Did you know that over half of the traffic to most websites is now from mobile devices? This means your website isn’t performing as well as it could be. And if your website isn’t performing well, your business suffers.

It’s not always easy to develop a website that is optimized for all mobile devices. That’s why so many companies outsource to a professional web design company. So how can you tell if you need outside help? Here are some signs:

• You have trouble reading the text on your website on a smartphone.
• Your website doesn’t look good on an iPhone or Android device.
• Visitors are signing up for your newsletter, but then they’re bouncing off of your site and never visiting again.

 

 

The best way to optimize your website is through careful planning and analysis of what’s already working on your site and what isn’t. You can do this yourself by using analytics software, like Google Analytics, but in-depth analysis takes time.

If you are looking for ways to make more money from your website, you should consider outsourcing this process to a professional web design company that can handle all aspects of the optimization for you.”

 

7. Create a Fast, Reliable User Experience

There is no reason why your website should not be fast. If you are willing to put in the effort, you can make it lightning-fast, and this article will show you how.

First of all, though, I have to warn you that websites do not run themselves. They do not automatically get faster over time. You have to work on them; they don’t work on themselves.

In a way, this makes things easier. You know that if you want your website to improve something or other–whether it’s the conversion rate, the bounce rate, or the time people spend on your site–you just have to work on that thing. This is easy to understand; it’s also easy to forget. But if speed is what you are after, then you need a strategy for making speed improvements happen.

You are also going to need a metric for measuring your progress. It may seem as though speed is self-evident, but it isn’t; there is more than one way of measuring speed and there are many ways of speeding up a website without making it faster for users.

 

8. Create an Error 404 Page That Helps Users Navigate Away from Your Site

What is an error 404 page?

So, you have a website, and visitors go to the home page directly, but what do they do when they reach a page that does not exist? This is a 404 error page. What should you do when this happens?

 

 

Uses of 404 Error Page

A 404 error page is used to display a message on a web page to the visitor if he or she tries to access a webpage that does not exist. The webpage can be deleted, moved, or never existed. It is also used for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes to prevent indexing of the same content in different URLs.

SEO can be used in a variety of ways, from obtaining leads from your website’s visitors to ensuring that people actually click through to your site when they search for something on Google.

These are some examples of pages that you can use:

– A marketing campaign: When visitors get the 404 error message, the chance that they will contact you increases. So, you can use this chance to promote your business by offering new or additional information about your product or service. You can send an email asking users to subscribe to your newsletter or fill out a form with their name and email address so that you can contact them again later.

A well-designed 404 page can:

• Avoid confusing users by clearly directing them to a relevant page on your site. This will help with both your bounce rate and maintaining a positive user experience.
• Provide an opportunity to add value to the user by providing a gateway to other content on your site. For example, if you have a 404 page that promotes blog posts related to the content of the expired page, you’re more likely to get the traffic back on your site.
• Provide an opportunity for you to connect with your users. This is especially true for eCommerce sites that would otherwise lose sales due to expired links or pages.

When done well, a 404 page can be beneficial from an SEO standpoint as well. While most webmasters don’t think about creating these pages in terms of SEO, it’s important to realize that users who reach these pages are actively seeking information about your company or brand. If done correctly, a 404 page can be the perfect place for you to add useful information about your brand or products, encouraging those users to visit other valuable pages on your site.”

Create a custom 404 page for your website using HTML.

There are two ways you can create a 404 error page for your website, they are as follows

First:

Let us begin by creating a bare-bones HTML page. This will be the foundation for our more elaborate 404! error web page, which will greet visitors when they see our site has nothing of interest to offer them.

Create a text file with the name “shorelinesurfteam.html” and add the following HTML code:

 

<!DOCTYPE html>

<!– Created By Syspree–>

<html lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>

<head>

<meta charset=”utf-8″>

<title>404 Error Page | Syspree</title>

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style.css”>

</head>

<body>

<div id=”error-page”>

<div class=”content”>

<h2 class=”header” data-text=”404″>

404

</h2>

<h4 data-text=”Opps! Page not found”>

Opps! Page not found

</h4>

<p>

Sorry, the page you’re looking for doesn’t exist. If you think something is broken, report a problem.

</p>

<div class=”btns”>

<a href=”https://syspree.com/”>return home</a>

<a href=”https://syspree.com/”>report problem</a>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</body>

</html>

 

Next, create a CSS file with the name style.css and paste the given code in your CSS file. Remember to use .css as the filename extension.

@import url(‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Poppins:400,500,600,700&display=swap’);

*{

margin: 0;

padding: 0;

outline: none;

box-sizing: border-box;

font-family: ‘Poppins’, sans-serif;

}

body{

height: 100vh;

background: -webkit-repeating-linear-gradient(-45deg, #71b7e6, #69a6ce, #b98acc, #ee8176, #b98acc, #69a6ce, #9b59b6);

background-size: 400%;

}

#error-page{

position: absolute;

top: 10%;

left: 15%;

right: 15%;

bottom: 10%;

display: flex;

align-items: center;

justify-content: center;

background: #fff;

box-shadow: 0px 5px 10px rgba(0,0,0,0.1);

}

#error-page .content{

max-width: 600px;

text-align: center;

}

.content h2.header{

font-size: 18vw;

line-height: 1em;

position: relative;

}

.content h2.header:after{

position: absolute;

content: attr(data-text);

top: 0;

left: 0;

right: 0;

background: -webkit-repeating-linear-gradient(-45deg, #71b7e6, #69a6ce, #b98acc, #ee8176, #b98acc, #69a6ce, #9b59b6);

background-size: 400%;

-webkit-background-clip: text;

-webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;

text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px rgba(255,255,255,0.25);

animation: animate 10s ease-in-out infinite;

}

@keyframes animate {

0%{

background-position: 0 0;

}

25%{

background-position: 100% 0;

}

50%{

background-position: 100% 100%;

}

75%{

background-position: 0% 100%;

}

100%{

background-position: 0% 0%;

}

}

.content h4{

font-size: 1.5em;

margin-bottom: 20px;

text-transform: uppercase;

color: #000;

font-size: 2em;

max-width: 600px;

position: relative;

}

.content h4:after{

position: absolute;

content: attr(data-text);

top: 0;

left: 0;

right: 0;

text-shadow: 1px 1px 2px rgba(255,255,255,0.4);

-webkit-background-clip: text;

-webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;

}

.content p{

font-size: 1.2em;

color: #0d0d0d;

}

.content .btns{

margin: 25px 0;

display: inline-flex;

}

.content .btns a{

display: inline-block;

margin: 0 10px;

text-decoration: none;

border: 2px solid #69a6ce;

color: #69a6ce;

font-weight: 500;

padding: 10px 25px;

border-radius: 25px;

text-transform: uppercase;

transition: all 0.3s ease;

}

.content .btns a:hover{

background: #69a6ce;

color: #fff;

}

Congratulations! You successfully created a Custom 404 Error Page Design using HTML & CSS.

Second:

We know creating a full 404 error page with code could be a little bit tedious, so we would first give you an essay on how to do this.

Instead of writing a complete free HTML and CSS 404-page template. Use this to create your 404-error with an image or a loop video.

There you have it, two ways to create your 404 error page.

 

9. Google’s Panda Update Targets Sites with Low-Quality Content

Google’s Panda Update is a filter that prevents you from ranking well in Google searches if your site is riddled with low-quality content.

Low-quality content doesn’t mean just spam; it also includes large amounts of duplicate or poor-quality material. For example, the use of guest post spam badly affected many sites during the Panda update.

The Panda update targeted users who went to a site, found nothing valuable, and then left the site, expecting to find better results on Google. If your website doesn’t provide value or entertainment to visitors, they’ll leave your site and that will hurt your SEO rankings.

Treat your web visitors like guests in your house. If you would never invite someone into your home for a meal that didn’t taste good, don’t serve up boring, useless, or poorly written content on your site.

 

 

On the other hand, Panda targets sites with low-quality content. If you give people something they can enjoy and share with others, they’ll come back, likely bringing their friends and family with them too.

The best way to get more traffic to your website is by creating useful and helpful content – not by trying to trick search engines into thinking you’re a better website than you are!

Now the question which arises, how does google measures quality content, here’s your answer from experts in

Content Quality: How Does Google Measure It?

Google judges websites based on three criteria: value, engagement, and trust. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, value is based on such factors as whether the content answers a specific question, is unique or original, provides useful information, or teaches something useful.

Engagement refers to factors such as visitor participation (social media sharing), time spent on the website, bounce rate, and page views per session. Trust is determined by factors such as the website’s history of changes and updates, external links leading to the site (and their anchor text), the site’s reputation in the industry or community it serves, reviews (if applicable), and more.

So remember to create quality content by creating visitors in mind and providing them with value.

 

10. Create a sitemap.xml file

A sitemap.xml file is a file that describes your website to search engines, so they can organize and understand your website content better. A sitemap.xml file helps search engines display your content in the best possible way based on the search terms people use when looking for your content.

 

 

You can add a sitemap to any website, and we recommend all websites have one. It’s particularly important for business websites that get updated frequently with new products and services, as it allows search engines to keep up with the changes you make.

A sitemap gives you complete control over how your content is organized from an SEO perspective, and it also tells search engine crawlers what parts of your site you want them to crawl more frequently or at all.

A sitemap is particularly useful if your website contains multiple sections, each of which contains unique information and requires its URLs.”

To create and know more about sitemap, we have created an entire blog regarding this, SEO (2022) What You Should Know When Creating A Sitemap.

 

11. Use hreflang tags

The hreflang attribute is a powerful SEO tool that helps search engines determine which language and country variations of your website to show in their results.

This article will help you understand why you should care about hreflang annotations and how to use them correctly for maximum impact.

Why Should You Care About Hreflang Annotations?

On the surface, what the hreflang attribute does may not seem like a big deal. It’s just one more thing to add to an already long list of things you need to do for proper SEO.

Google has said time and time again that they want to serve the best results possible.

One of the biggest complaints webmasters have had against Google’s search algorithms is that they aren’t very transparent. And while the search engine’s transparency reports have helped a lot in this area, sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly how Google is determining “best” or even what “best” means.

With hreflang annotations, however, it becomes clear that Google wants searchers in different locations and/or speaking different languages to see results that are tailored as closely as possible to their needs and preferences.

International search engine optimization is a complex topic with many variations and strategies, but the hreflang tag is a simple way to show search engines which version of your site to show to users depending on their location. This can help you rank in multiple countries and build your brand internationally.

The first reason to use hreflang tags is that they’re a great way to optimize your internal linking structure. The most important parts of SEO are often the simplest ones: ensuring that your internal links point to the correct pages and that they point only to the correct pages. A single typo in an internal link can send people — and search engine spiders — to the wrong place, which can have a major impact on your search engine rankings.

The second reason for using hreflang tags is to make sure that you’re not sending mixed signals about where you want people from different locations to land.

For example, if you have separate English-language and Spanish-language versions of your website, you may want the English version to be indexed in the United States and Canada and the Spanish one indexed in Mexico, while still both being accessible from both countries. If someone searching from Mexico types in “español,” you don’t want them directed automatically to the US version.

 

12. Create a robots.txt file

Create a file called robots.txt at the root of your domain and list all the files you want to be blocked from search engine indexing. Robots automatically crawl your site and add everything they find in the index so it’s important to not block any files that should be indexed.

Buckle down and start removing duplicate content from your site. Duplicate content is one of the biggest issues for search engines when it comes to ranking pages. You don’t want to have multiple copies of the same piece of content on your site because this confuses both users and search engines.

Update your CMS to a more user-friendly system like WordPress or Drupal, as these provide a lot of features that can help make on-page SEO easier for you, such as custom title tags, meta descriptions, social media integration, page caching and more.

Make sure that you’re utilizing all available images with your keyword phrase within the image’s alt tags. Alt tags are an important part of any image because they provide information about the image when someone has their images turned off or if they visit your post using a screen reader. This is also another way to improve users’ experience while improving SEO.

 

13. Make sure you have proper XML sitemaps implemented

XML Sitemaps are a great way to ensure that your site’s available to search engines and that you’re getting the most out of your SEO. Whether you run a large e-commerce operation or just want to make sure that your visitors can easily find what they’re looking for, XML sitemaps are a good place to start.

XML sitemaps are a map for search engines to follow. It tells them what pages are on your website and where they are located. So, when Google visits your website, it will check to see if you have an XML sitemap. If you do, Google will use that to determine where everything on your site is located.

Not all XML sitemaps are created equal. Some plugins just spit out the HTML code exactly as it appears on the page and doesn’t change anything. So why not include those? The problem is that when you go to submit your XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools (or whichever search engine you choose), they won’t accept it unless it looks like an XML file.

If you’re using a plugin that just outputs page titles, descriptions, and URLs in your XML sitemap, then that’s not going to work! You need a plugin that will create an XML file for you so that search engines will accept it and index it.

Also, treat your XML sitemaps like an operating system for your website. A good operating system allows you to access any file on your computer, regardless of where it is located. Likewise, a good XML sitemap allows search engines to locate any piece of content on your site, regardless of where it is located.

But while an operating system might help you find apps such as Firefox or Chrome, an XML sitemap can help you attract traffic from search engines. Just like you don’t need to install any special software to access files on your computer, you also don’t need any special software to access the contents of an XML sitemap.

 

14. Avoid javascript and flash on your site if you want good search engine rankings

Flash and JavaScript can be too powerful tools for creating a more enjoyable user experience, but we as Experts from a leading SEO company in Mumbai can tell you that they can also slow down the loading of your site. As a result, you may lose valuable search engine traffic. Fortunately, there are several ways to keep Flash and JavaScript from causing SEO problems.
YOUR USER EXPERIENCE IS YOUR SEO STRENGTH
Search engines are all about providing users with the best possible experience, so it’s in their best interest to give websites that provide an enjoyable user experience high rankings. That’s why you need to make sure that your website is easy to use and visually appealing. Visitors should be able to find what they want on your website, and once they do, they should be able to easily navigate through all areas of your site.

Flash and JavaScript Widgets Can Hurt SEO

Flash is a programming tool that was developed by Macromedia in 1996. It’s used for animation, video, games and other interactive digital media. It also allows developers to create their own interactive websites, but since Flash isn’t supported by all browsers, this web development tool doesn’t translate well into SEO.

JavaScript is another programming language that’s commonly used on websites. It’s important for building interactive websites with dynamic content and it can be used to create image rollovers (that change images when a visitor mouses over the image). But it can also be used to slow down your website or even crash a computer.

Because of these drawbacks, search engines don’t read or index Flash-based or JavaScript-based websites as effectively as websites without these widgets. This means that search engine results pages will often contain sites that have better SEO than your site.*

Now that you know that Flash and JavaScript can negatively impact your website’s search engine optimization.  The best way to tell if your website is being negatively affected by these technologies is to use the Fetch as Google feature in the Google Webmaster Tools (formerly known as Google Analytics). To do this, follow these steps:

• Log into your Webmaster Tools account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
• Click on Search Traffic -> Accessibility -> Fetch as Google.
• Enter the URL of the page you want to crawl and click the “Fetch and Render” button.
• The tool will return a list of issues it found with rendering the page, including Flash and JavaScript-related messages. It will also rate each issue based on severity by using a traffic light system (green, yellow, or red). Green indicates no problems were found, yellow means there might be a problem but it’s not severe, and red indicates a serious problem that you should address right away.
• Each message should contain a “Fixing…” link, that when clicked will provide more details on how to fix the issue. You can also click through to further information provided by developers and standards bodies such as W3C and WHATWG.

 

15. Optimize your images’ metadata

Optimizing the metadata of your images can improve your SERP’s and user experience. Here is a simple guide, starting from the basics:

Start by choosing a file name and saving it with the highest quality possible. Use descriptive words as keywords. Images are unreadable to computer programs, so if you give it something that it recognizes and understands, then you are making a good first step.

 

 

Title your image: This should be in the top left of the image and should contain words relevant to your blog post or website. Also, remember to include relevant keywords in the title.

Alt Tag: This is where you should put a short description of the image, such as what is going on in the picture. When someone has their images turned off, this tag helps them understand what is happening in the image without having to open it. It is also good for SEO purposes because it shows Google what your picture is about, therefore increasing its chance of being shown on page 1 of Google follows, tools powerful results. There should be no more than two lines of text here so try & keep it brief!

URL: If you would like this image to appear on another page, then you would want to include the URL of that page here.

Size: The standard image size for most social media is 1080 pixels wide by 1920 pixels tall, or a 1.91:1 aspect ratio. Images that are sized at 960 x 720 or smaller look especially pixelated on most screens. 16:9 is the format featured in photography and film. This 1:1 ratio image size is used frequently on social media, especially on Facebook and Instagram.

 

Conclusion:

Developing user experience (UX) is essential to SEO because, in the end, user satisfaction matters the most. So, as you start your journey of improvement in user experience, take a moment to learn about the importance of creating one of the other important SEO ranking factors i.e creating a sitemap for your website. Read up on how sitemaps help you keep your content up to date and organized.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]