The evolution of the website has been nothing short of amazing over the past 20 years. From humble beginnings in the early 90s, with basic HTML and text-based pages featuring the odd .gif image to the code-heavy, media-rich interactive experience that is the modern website, standards and practices in web design are at the highest they have ever been.
No longer is it enough to deliver a basic informational page but users and search engines alike now expect various interactions, layouts, and operating protocols that demonstrate a proactive approach to designing your site around an excellent balance of relevancy, information, and features.
Current industry standards are focused on 3 deliverables that can have a significant impact on your site’s ranking:
- Customer experience (CX)
- User experience (UX)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
CX focuses on meaningful interactions from start to finish both online and offline while UX implements strong digital practices that make it as easy as possible for a user to navigate and SEO focuses on your business strategy by speaking to the search engines and users.
Customer Experience (CX)
There are many factors that can affect the customer experience that relates not only to how content is displayed and conveyed on a website, but also any features that are further implemented. A good CX provides the tools necessary for a start-to-finish interaction between your business and a user.
A well-designed CX aims to implement your business strategy from a customer perspective where the customer can engage in a meaningful way. This could include finding relevant information, contact details, or rich features such as a proactive or reactive Live Chat contact system similar to click4assistance.co.uk as well as traditional channels like email and calling.
User Experience (UX)
Purely from a user perspective, a good UX aims to guide users throughout your website in as efficient a manner as possible and should not try to impose any part of a business strategy. Navigation should be simple, easily readable, and categorized at the very least from the point of entry to leaving.
A better UX can be implemented by analyzing user interaction through such systems as Google Analytics where metrics such as page retention, scrolling time, tags, and point of entry pages can be monitored and some of these metrics, such as keywords can be evaluated when preparing future improvements and a better SEO strategy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A combination of business strategy and customer focus, SEO seeks to enhance the experience of the user through the relevance of information as provided through the medium of the search engine. Search engines such as Google will use multiple algorithms to determine the relevancy of your page or site which can be compounded by the proper use of such things as keywords, headings, and image attributes.
Since a search engine cannot read a page in the same way as a user does, it is therefore highly practical and necessary to implement sound SEO on all pages on a given site and maintain these practices across every page. This not only ensures that a site is read properly by crawlers but that a user is shown the correct results. Ranking penalties will occur should a search engine detect false intent such as SEO cloaking.
Image Courtesy of Pixabay
