Your page title and meta-tag contents are obvious factors for searchability, but more sophisticated search engines look at much more than the page head to determine relevance in an online search. Some search engines also consider factors that may appear 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. User engagement is measured using a set of rules and operations—in other words, an algorithm, to calculate the usefulness as well as 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.
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, 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 longer than expected 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 websites, 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
You have learned a few important design principles as you've studied web authoring and worked on your own website projects. Let's briefly review some key points of good design, since good design principles are the key to a positive user engagement.
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 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.
Question
How does visual hierarchy play a role in designing for your intended audience?
Knowing your audience is really the starting point for all good design. If you know who you're trying to target with your website, you can use visual hierarchy to ensure that the most important elements stand out.
For example, you are working on an e-commerce site that sells dog toys. Your target audience will likely be dog owners, ranging from 20-40 years of age. A lot of online shopping is performed on a smart phone, so your site will need to be mobile friendly and easy to navigate. When shopping online, people usually want to see pictures and prices, which also means you will use heading tags for categories, thumb nails for product images, and a grid system for your layout.
Outlining who your target audience is before you start designing is imperative to establishing an effective visual hierarchy.
