#SEOTips: Experience – Part 1

Repeat with me, “user experience, user experience, user experience.” When you fire up the ol’ Google machine, I’ll make a guess you like your sites to load fast and you want everything to be made as simple as possible. We all want social share buttons and digestible content NOW! What this means for us web-page optimizers is we have to make the sites user-friendly, all up and down. Because Google knows we want our content right now, and Google delivers, guys, Google, delivers. Here’s how to be user-friendly in the web space:

Weave Your Pages like a Beautiful Basket

K, hold on, what? I’m talking internal links. More recently, internal links on your site have become increasingly important. What is an internal link? An internal link is a link you link to on your page, from  your own website, like this: Google Anatomy. The more you link back to your own content or pages on your site, the longer a user is likely to stay on your page and explore. At least that’s the idea. You want to weave your own pages together as much as possible to expand the reader’s knowledge on your business.

Be like Ansel Adams….or something

So maybe you don’t need to be a super amazing photographer like Ansel Adams… but you do need to increase your use of images on your site. Pages including images have increased time on site, enhancing the user experience. Images are like a double whammy, if you will. Not only does the image show up on the post, but can also appear separately under a Google image search if optimized.

Smile for the Camera!

Video integration. We’ve talked about this, do it. Make a YouTube page. 8 out of 10 videos in the top SERPs are from YouTube. It has become increasingly more difficult for other video platforms to show up on Google’s rank. Videos are fun to make, fun to watch and very shareable. You can use video for your site to convey demos, culture, competitions, promotions, anything! Just be creative and you’re bound to gain some love from our friend, Google.

Be “Design-y”

Something our designers here at Red Branch hate hearing, but hey, it works. Responsive web design is when your web page adjusts according to whichever device a user is using your site on. So if I’m viewing your website on my phone, it should look the same as it would on a laptop or tablet, but smaller.  Searchmetrics says only about 10% of analyzed URLs use responsive design, with up to more than 10% difference within the top 30 search results. Creating a site that is responsive to all devices can put you ahead of the game and make your visitors on the go very pleased.

Before we have any exploding heads, we’ll let this part I settle in before I hit you with part II next week when I discuss mean font size, interactive elements, presence of unordered lists, and bulleted lists.

The Branchers

We build the best damn marketing campaigns on the planet. And we do it for industries and companies you might not identify as easy to market (right away). Working here takes a very special kind of person.