It may seem obvious to you that a search engine would scan the keywords and other elements you list in your metadata and use that information to decide if your website is relevant for a particular searcher's request. Larger, more sophisticated search engines like Google do much more than determine relevance, however. They also consider factors that are seemingly less tangible—such as how long the typical visitor to your website stays there. This factor is called dwell time, because it measures the degree to which users "dwell" on your website.
Another way to talk about dwell time is user engagement, the degree to which users engage with the content and assets on your website. Search engines measure user engagement using a set of rules and operations—in other words, an algorithm, to calculate the usefulness and also the usability of your web site. Usability is a broad term that encompasses many aspects of your website's design and overall performance—it refers to the things that make a website more user-friendly. You can improve usability by improving the design of your website—or by designing it well from the beginning.
What factors affect the usability of your website? Click through the slides below to review the most critical elements.
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Content If you provide useful and interesting content, visitors to your site are likely to stay longer, click on more links, return to the site, or even bookmark it or paste its url into comments, blog posts and other online venues. For some search engines, such as Google, when visitors bookmark your content, it automatically boosts your ranking. For these reasons, the content you provide—its quality, depth, and relevance to the average person—should be your very first consideration. If you have nothing useful to offer visitors, they won't dwell long. Load Speed As you know, users may leave your site before even looking at its content if they have to wait a few extra seconds for a page to load. For search engine algorithms, a visitor leaving your site quickly increases the website's bounce rate (its tendency to drive users away instead of holding them on your site). Search engines measure how many visitors leave and how quickly the average visitor "bounces out." Links Search engines notice many things about the links on your website: where they go, when they're broken, and how often users click on them. You should include links to a few well-respected, authoritative web sites, and you should check often to make sure those links still work. In this way, you can improve your website's "trust factor" in the view of search engines, which will increase your ranking and move you closer to the top of a results list. Readability You may be hoping for a fairly well-educated audience for your website, but that doesn't mean they'll want to read a dissertation or jargon-filled technical writing while surfing the web. Most readers, regardless of skill, expect to scan anything written for the web, settling on the most relevant information and ignoring the rest. You can help them do this by writing very clear text that does not rely on long, complicated sentences or words that users might have to look up in a dictionary. If you must use specialized terms, define them in the same sentence, using everyday language. Design Hopefully you've learned a few important design principles as you've studied web authoring and worked on your own website projects. The rules for good design are so important to user engagement, though, that they bear repeating. In general, less is more when it comes to web page design. You want the important things to stand out and anything else to be understated or invisible. For instance, visitors to your site should be able to read the text without noticing the font you use. They should find it easy to focus only on the most essential elements on a page without being distracted by other, less important elements. If there are too many design-related distractions, the experience will be unpleasant for visitors, and they will leave, increasing your bounce rate. |
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