When you hear the phrase “SEO,” what comes to mind? When you’re attempting to increase your website’s SEO rating, where do you put all of your efforts?

Most people devote a significant percentage of their time to “keywords” and nothing else.

If you’ve been working hard on keyword optimization but aren’t seeing the results you desire, you may need to look at additional aspects that influence SEO ranking.

Search engine algorithms consider information such as the length of time visitors spend on your site, bounce rate, broken links, pages visited, inbound and outbound links, and so on, in addition to the relevancy of your keywords on pages and metadata concerning a user’s search terms.

So, let’s look at how different aspects of website usability affect rankings, what are the different ways to optimise your blog posts, how to improve SEO rankings by improving website usability, and what to do when usability and SEO “best practises” appear to be at conflict.

• Optimising page load speed: If users have to wait even a few seconds longer for each page to load, they may exit your site which would lower dwell time, raise bounce rate, and diminish the number of pages seen, all of which would harm your SEO ranking. Using caching plug-ins, ensuring sure the code is clean and streamlined, optimising picture sizes, lowering the number of plug-ins, and eliminating redirection are just a few of the strategies to improve page load time.

• Enhancing readability: It doesn’t matter even if your target audience is well-educated, you don’t want people to click away from your webpage because it’s too tough to understand. Making your material simple to read and understand will help your viewers find it more valuable. According to some analysts, Google considers readability when ranking web pages.

• Providing felicitous & high-quality content: When you give relevant information, users are more likely to stay on your website longer to devour the information, increasing dwell time. (Pro tip: Another motivation to generate very valuable content is that people who bookmark your article on Chrome will help your website’s SEO ranking in Google).

• Optimising Images: Using keywords in your picture’s file name, alt tag, title, description, and caption can help search engines determine the relevance of your material.

• Enhancing the content layout by the use of header tags: The user experience of your website is greatly enhanced by a good content layout. It encourages users to spend time reading your material and return for more, signalling to search engines that your content is relevant. Header tags may be used to divide your material into sections that are easier to read and use.

• Improving the use of external links: Linking to well-known referring domains can not only boost the relevancy of your content and the number of time visitors spend on your site, but it is also thought to provide trust signals to Google, which will help your SEO ranking.

• Enhance the usability of your websites by taking care of broken links: Who wants to be sent to a 404 error page after clicking a link? Usability suffers as a result of broken connections. Not only that but a big number of broken links is seen by search engines as a symptom of an outdated, neglected site, which can hurt your SEO rating. Thankfully, you don’t have to manually verify all of your links on every page of your website since there are several tools and programmes available to assist you in ensuring that your website is clear of broken links, including W3C link checker, Google webmaster tool and so on.

• Use proper formatting: An effective layout would help make your material easier to scan and digest, allowing your readers to stay on your site longer and ingest the information you provide.

• Adequate site architecture: A “flat” site style not only makes it easier to access content, but it may also help with SEO rankings by revealing links to all relevant pages, allowing search engines to traverse the entire site more easily.

• Mobile SEO is crucial: Mobile users are becoming more prevalent, and not being mobile optimised will have an impact on user experience and conversion. Most of the sites are penalised by Google for not being mobile-optimised.

• Enabling Social Sharing: Installing social sharing buttons on your website will not only make it easier for readers to share your material, but it will also help you rank better in search results.

Stay tuned to Writewit for frequent updates to learn more about how to optimise your blog entries and improve your rankings effectively.