User Experience is a Big Deal
If you have a website that is full of valuable keyword phrases that are reflected in your meta tags then you’re set for great SEO, right? Nope, if a person is looking for your products or services and finds your website that’s great but once they’re there if they can’t find what they’re looking for right away they’ll leave. Organizing your website in a way that is easy for users to navigate can be the difference between failure and success. Learn a few SEO factors that matter more than keywords below.
The Structure and Navigation of Your Site Is a Big Deal
Users need to easily understand how to get around your site, and Google serves as an enforcement agent that ensures the greatest number of easily navigable sites. If your navigation is cleanly organized, with a concise and clear main nav and several submenus that are intelligently organized, you’ll stand to benefit far more than a site with links posted all over the place. Be sure to include a sitemap, as well as traditional standby pages like Contact, About, and Services pages. Without a solid, intuitive structure in place, it won’t matter what your content says.
Site Speed and Security Are Becoming More Important
Site speed has been an important ranking factor for a while now, but with increasing competition and user access on more devices, speed is more important than ever. Maximize your site speed by implementing a clean caching system, reducing the size of your images, and getting rid of unnecessary clutter in your back end.
Additionally, site security is emerging as a new ranking factor. Already, sites with SSL encryption (denoted by an https: in the URL) are getting a ranking boost over their non-encrypted counterparts; this value for site security is bound to increase over time.
