Website Design: Better Ranking Strategies

[professorrosado]

What features on a website have you found to improve rankings?
Things that you didn't have before but when you did add them, you noticed an improvement in rankings or traffic?

 

[dlane1987]

When I started adding a share button my rankings improved because people could share easier when they liked something which i amuse pushed me up.

 

[kian.j]

Definitely share buttons and good content that engages the viewers. Also, my whole website is focused on delivering the best UX there could be. I ran A/B tests to choose the best version of my website. Hope it helps!

 

[professorrosado]

Has anyone used multiple share "areas" in their website layouts? Side float and top of post, content lock for social share and below post?

Has this resulted in more shares and traffic increases?

 

[dlane1987]

dlane1987

I tried this but it resulted in a dramatic decrease in shares i'm going to try different combinations and see what works the most.

 

[Latest]

The better ranking depend on design of website. Attractive design encourage users for view the website. Design is most efficient factor in website keyword ranking. Unique content also play good role in keyword ranking.

 

[professorrosado]

professorrosado

Really?
Is this a direct correlation? I can see how design and functionality can reduce bounce rates which in turn impact your ranking. I think that is what you're saying. Good content also reduces bounce rates but I think Google / SE's qualify content with other factors too. Isn't this correct?

 

[Latest]

Latest

Yes, Good design encourage visitor to stay for long time on website that reduce bounces rate.

 

[AbeloHost]

Design is a factor because it entices a visitor to jump to several pages of a website. This is good for ranking as it reduces the bounce rate.

A bigger factor I found, however, is the speed of the website. Although Wordpress is pretty good for SEO, I often see PHP websites or HTML websites dominating the nr. 1 positions. Why? Because it makes the site load incredibly fast.

 

[RDO Servers]

RDO Servers

Umm, most websites are php or HTML
Are you saying that asp.net and Ruby on rails sites are slow?

Just because a site uses php or HTML does not make the site fast. There are many other factors involved!

 

[PTTed]

PTTed

I think if you conduct more analysis on how much site speed affects rankings you will discover that it has next to zero impact unless a site is a loading very, very slowly. Based on my personal experience, I don't think site speed affects rankings in a positive way much at all. Rather, I believe it is more of a potential negative ranking factor.

In other words, making your site faster won't help the ranking directly. But, if your site/page is really slow, it can impact your rankings negatively.

If your site/page loads faster, then it is providing a better user experience, which might impact rankings indirectly because that person is very slightly more likely to share your page and very slightly more likely to link to your page and those things might end up earning you a link somewhere that helps boost your ranking. But directly, there isn't much of an effect at all. At least not according to my results.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

Too many people bought all the Google BS about site speed and having a mobile friendly site.

I honestly have seen zero impact on rankings from either one of those factors. What Google really wanted, in my opinion, is for people to make more user-friendly sites in order to help increase AdSense and to some degree AdWords revenue.

It was all a big smokescreen.

 

[PTTed]

PTTed

Yeah.

I basically don't even worry about site speed at all unless I have a page that is loading very slowly for some reason. Sometimes I will fix it and sometimes I don't even bother. It depends on the circumstances. But I know that page load speed is a very weak factor because I have had really slowly loading speed pages that still ranked number one with very little other SEO factors involved. If page load speed was much of a factor, at least some of those pages should have been demoted. And I have never seen a single case where I could attribute it to slow page loading speeds. Maybe it has happened without my knowledge and I have heard other people say that they think it happened to them. But I have not personally seen it happen with more than one site it should have happened on. It just isn't a big enough factor to worry about very much. Like everything, it depends on the specific circumstances. If it was an ecommerce site loading slowly I would definitely fix it. If it was an information based website loading slowly, I wouldn't care so much.

And with Google it might matter more for an ecommerce site than for an information based site. I don't know.