Think of a time where you visited a website and couldn’t find what you were looking for. No search box, poor navigation, slow to load on your computer. All of these functional issues, and more, impact your search engine rankings.
They lead to increased bounce rates, reduced conversion rates and an overall poor opinion of your site.
Now, how does this relate to rankings? Users are less likely to visit your site again and run to a competitor’s site instead. Users may not be able to find your contact form (hopefully the website has one) or phone number, therefore cannot reach you. The following are a few general rules to follow when designing, or redesigning, your website.
-Users will only wait 7 seconds for a page to download on the internet. Make sure your website downloads faster than 6.
-If you have an e-commerce website, make sure your shopping cart is at the upper right. Same goes for your search box.
-Use anchor text where applicable. Link your homepage content to other areas of your site.
-Use keywords (but not too many, or repetitive) in your html copy.
-Don’t use Flash. Many phones cannot view it, thus making it non-user friendly.
-Use alt tags to describe your images. Since search engines cannot read images, the name of the image, along with the alt tag, will ensure that they will be crawled when indexed.
-Use descriptive file names for attachments.
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