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WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER
MARKETING TECHNOLOGY
SEO and Web Design Best Practices
what users rely on to get meaningful suggestions for content. Amazon.
com uses a type of user behavior to offer suggestions for additional or
supplementary products.
"Craing a thoughtful, empathetic user experience helps
ensure that visitors to your site perceive it positively,
encouraging sharing, bookmarking, return visits, and
inbound links—all signals that trickle down to the search
engines and contribute to high rankings."
– Rand Fishkin and Moz Staff
P O P U L A R I T Y
Although domain popularity (not to be confused with authority) once
was not as strong of an influencer over search results, it is increasingly
becoming more impactful. Users want to see what they like which has
given merit to websites which might produce inferior quality pieces
of content from a writing perspective. So long as the site pulls in high
Takeaway: Sometimes even your "most optimized" content will not
rank well if you aren't ensuring there is a positive user experience or
demonstrated a continuous flow of traffic.
Tip: Review engagement metrics to confirm your webpages are not
bouncing users.
Tools: Siteimprove, Google Analytics
page/site traffic, frequent page engagements, lengthy time on site,
and numerous pages per session, a page ranking for an "inferior" piece
of content shows higher in search results. Google and other search
engines appear to be providing more "authority" to these popular sites.
W H A T D O E S T H I S M E A N M O V I N G
F O R W A R D ?
Optimizing code for search engines is now a commonplace SEO tactic
and is a built-in feature of most CMS tools. These CMS features have
made way for different page indicators to influence search results such
as location, user behavior and experience, and popularity.
It is important to note that SEO lives with uncertainty. There
is yet to be a secret formula to guarantee a content manager or web
designer will predict what search engines are using to rank page
content. There are good conjectures and guidelines, but every SEO
prediction is based on some level of speculation on how search
engines will respond. SEO is liable to continually change in the future;
therefore, it is best to rely on doing what is best for your visitors rather
than guess what is best strictly for search engines.
Takeaway: Focus on building "popularity" by driving traffic to your
site, repurposing content on social media and other websites,
optimizing page layouts in increase time on site, and add calls-to-
action which drive visitors to additional pages..
Tools: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook (whichever meets your firm's
digital strategy)
It is important to note
that SEO lives with
uncertainty. There
is yet to be a secret
formula to guarantee
a content manager
or web designer will
predict what search
engines are using to
rank page content.
