WEBSITES CAN NO LONGER TREAT SEO AND UX AS 2 SEPARATE THINGS

Search engine optimization can affect user experience, and vice versa, which means balancing SEO and UX is one of the most important things you can do as you design and manage your company’s website. Focusing on SEO without creating a good user experience will only provide disappointing results. Designing a beautiful website without optimizing keywords is a waste of time.

This week, I’ve collected articles that look at how SEO and UX combine to make websites beautiful and effective in serving customers.

How User Experience & User Intent Affect Panda, Penguin & Other Google Algorithms. SEM Post:“When most people focus on SEO, they think purely in terms of how Google sees the on-page elements of a page and how they could potentially be impacted by one of the many Google algorithms. But too often, SEOs are so focused on that aspect that they are forgetting two other areas that certainly play an important role on any page. One of my soap box speeches, to anyone who will listen, is SEO Best Practices can be categorized as two primary categories: User Experience and User Intent…

User Experience: According to Google’s answer card this is defined as ‘the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.’

User Intent: Can be defined as “providing information for what a user is looking for when they conduct a query.”

UX and SEO – How User Experience (UX) Is Taking the Forefront in SEO. Business 2 Community:“Although Google is trying its best – let me rephrase it, Google is doing its utmost – to deliver the users ideal results that they come seeking on the search engine. However, many SEOs are rather ignoring those hard efforts, and trying endlessly to ‘game’ the algorithm to increase rankings. Their main problem is that they are not thinking beyond the ranking. They are not looking at what the users actually want, but rather what the ‘dumb’ search-engine-bot (a.k.a Crawler/Google Spider) wants….All in all, we can safely conclude that if SEOs can put their keen focus on the UX of their site (along with on-page optimization, which is something Google still holds dear), they will see a huge improvement in their ranking and conversions.”

Why You’ll Never Have To Worry About Another Killer Google Algorithm Update. Forbes. “When Google first released Panda, it viewed its main search algorithm as an inferior product, or as one that needed substantial improvements. Because it used many quantifiable ranking factors, it was open to manipulation and was subject to a number of ranking inconsistencies and hiccups. But after Penguin and Panda, the core evaluation system of the algorithm was firmly in place. Sites with high-quality content, great user experience records, and a great reputation in the online community reliably rank higher than others. This fundamental quality standard has not changed in the past four years.”

Internal Links: A Critical Piece of the SEO Puzzle. Inbound Marketing Agents: “There are a couple reasons for internal linking in blog posts and content pages. First, it helps Google understand which pages are most important in the general hierarchy of content prioritization. When there are several pages that link to the “Services” page (for example) it sends a signal to Google that the “Services” page has very important valuable content. Another important reason for internal linking is for UX (user experience) purposes. You want to make it easy for your website visitors to find the information they are looking for. You should not just tell your visitors where to find related and important information but show them using internal links. When this is done correctly, it helps increase several areas of SEO.”

4 Reasons Your Company Ignores SEO (And How to Correct). Practical Ecommerce: “But modern SEO requires that we collaborate with other marketers and developers. Together with strategy, user experience, designers, writers, and coders, we need to accomplish our disparate disciplinary goals in service to the one large goal: serve customer experience to increase revenue. SEO is an excellent way to increase revenue by increasing customer acquisition and brand awareness. Depending on the strength of your marketing budgets and programs, SEO may drive between 10 and 50 percent of your ecommerce customers. That’s too large a segment to ignore, and too large an expansion opportunity to let pass without examining the reasons why SEO isn’t accepted at your company. Stop and think: Who are you talking to at your company and what aspects of SEO do they really need to know about to accomplish their work in an SEO-friendly manner? They do not need to know everything.”

BY MARC AVILA