Eight Search Engine usability tips to improve your website’s ranking

CULVER CITY, Calif. - Dec. 13, 2014 - PRLog -- When analyzing your website’s search engine rankings, most of the emphasis has been placed on developing excellent content.  The phrase “content is king” is found in numerous articles, which discuss search engine optimization.  Unfortunately the concept of usability is rarely discussed.  Usability is important and the major search engines are emphasizing this idea.  Panda 4.0 is mainly about content, but several aspects of the Panda 4.0 2014 update focus on usability.  In this article we will provide eight solid suggestions, which you can use to improve the user experience for your webpages.

1. Find accessibility issues

Google Webmaster Tools is the best place to search for any accessibility issues your website could possibly have. This free software will help you understand what is going on with your website.

A partner to Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools is more focused on the technical aspects of your website.

Google discovers your site’s content by sending out what is often known as a ‘spider’ to crawl your site’s pages. This bot moves around from link to link, cataloguing and/or indexing what it finds.  When the spider attempts to look at a page, your server will return a HTTP status code in response. This code gives the Google spider key information about your page.

Once you are logged into your Webmaster Tools account you can check to see if Google’s spider has found any crawling errors on your website. For example, it may find a ‘404 error’ which means ‘your page is not found’

2. Simplify your URL structure

Having a good site structure will greatly improve your chance of ranking well in Google’s results. By making your URL structure clear will simply allow search engines to easily find your most important content as well as helping your users to enjoy an excellent user experience.

I recommend using a simple structure.  All of your important content should be positioned within two clicks of your homepage when this is possible.

Your users will likely assume that your most important content is close to your homepage, as will search engines. Successful search engines are designed to copy user behavior.

3. Create an XML sitemap

Another way to let Google know which pages you consider important is by creating an XML sitemap.

An XML sitemap is a text file that maps your site and makes sure search engines crawl and index your pages on your website efficiently. Google has a free XML sitemap and I’ve personally observed that when a website adapts Google’s XML sitemap their rankings greatly improve.  It stands to reason because the sitemap is created by Google.

Your sitemap will communicate other useful information to Google – such as which pages you consider to be the most important and which have been changed recently.

4. Check your robots.txt file

A standard method of communicating with Google’s spider is to use a Robots.txt file.

This is a text file that allows you to tell search engines which of your site’s pages you want to crawl and which not to index. If your site already has this file, it’s usually found at yoursite.com/robots.txt

Here is an example of what your robots file may say:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

The “Disallow: /” line tells the spider not to crawl the site. In practice this means you’re instructing Google not to include any of your pages to be indexed in their search results.

5. Identify duplicate content

Duplicate content is a very important SEO issue.

Google may not show your pages in its results if it finds multiple versions of a page. This means your site is likely to suffer.

A common example of duplicate content is as follows:

www.yoursite.comwww.YOURSITE.com

You may believe these are one of the same but this is not necessarily the case. Google could see each version as a separate page. This would cause a problem with your rankings.

Other common duplication examples are listed below:

I. Architecture

Duplicate content is common on ecommerce sites. This problem commonly occurs when a product on the site is placed into more than one category with the site’s architecture not correctly setup to accommodate this properly.

Although this may make sense to a user, from a search engine’s point of view it is classed as duplication.

ii. HTTP vs HTTPs

HTTPs session can also cause duplicate content. HTTPs pages are secure, often for logins, shopping baskets and payment transactions – they provide an encrypted connection, making them more secure than a typical HTTP page.

If a page is accessible via both HTTP and HTTPs this may cause duplication issues.

iii. Pagination

Another error is when content is spread over multiple pages.  This is common on ecommerce sites that offer lots of products.

It is possible that Google will view these long blog posts as duplicates.

iv. URL capitalization

Capitalized letters in the URLs are another cause of duplication problems. Examples as follows:

www.example.com/abc

www.example.com/ABC

www.example.com/Abc

This issue can easily be resolved.

v. Click and session tracking

Some websites create ‘sessions’ for reasons such as tracking customers’ behavior. Such instances include when ecommerce sites create a session when a user is adding a product to their shopping cart. This session allows the user to continue shopping and browsing the site while maintaining their product(s) in the shopping cart.

A new URL will often be created when a new session has been created to allow the website to track the users’ activity. This makes it a duplication issue.

6. Use redirects correctly

There are a number of reasons why you may redirect content:

•When moving an old site to a new domain

•Directing traffic from one page to another

•Moving traffic from an expired page to an existing page

•Broken links on a page that you want to move to an alternative

There are a few different ways to redirect pages and it is advisable that you do so to avoid wasting traffic and losing your position in Google’s search results.

Start optimizing your website today.

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