20 Jun Website guide – SEO & UX tips

Posted at 17:17h in blog, ENG, UX, web design by
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UK As any web developer will tell you, in order to improve your website visibility/ranking and performance, next to obviously providing relevant and good content it is key to improve the user experience (UX) on the web presence. There is a huge amount of approaches and resources online, so I started compiling a list for personal usage, which strategies worked our best for me. The following might help you get started as well. Broadly, I now follow the process below:

  • testing out ideas: tweaking for better results and ranking, for details check out the section below
    • PART 1: content & structure
    • PART 2: performance & functionalities
    • PART 3: legitimacy & trust
  • collecting data/feedback:  measuring traffic to and on your website
  • improving iteratively towards your goal (back to step i)
    • Some improvements are are difficult to pull off, or have unintended or even comical consequences for example the WP plugin ‘Imagify’ completely backfired by changing all my picture catalogue by changing the image resolution to the wrong dimension for their intend use 
    • Hunting for mistakes / errors in your web code, strategy or design and correcting them (e.g. broken links: these can be tracked found with tools such as the dead link checker)
    • You will have to experiment by trial and error to get to where you want to go your self

PART1: Improving your website content and relevancy

You can start thinking about and working on the following aspects:

  • Choosing the rights semantics / domain name:
    • Short domain name that is easy to remember
    • Domain name containing or related words to the website content
  • Creating relevant & compelling content: this recommendation was brought to you by captain obvious ?
  • Presenting the content in a fashion that can be understood by your audience as well as by search engine/web crawler:
    • Always using adapted HTML, JavaScript identifiers
      • Having a page header HTML format
      • A clear and readable menu and page structure
        • By using a simple menu listing the main content into groups/by key words
    • Building and submitting a sitemap to the different search engines

To collect feedback on the  your website traffic & behaviour  between the menus and pages you can use the behaviour flow tool from Google analytics:

 

PART2: Improving the website performance

To improve the overall experience of a website as well as to improve the search engine ranking, a key ingredient is the loading speed. In nowadays mobile phone era this has become even more important. For enhancing the website performance and functionalities, it’s useful to look at these items and Tipps such to improve website speed:

  • Clean & compressed code
    • Using a clean theme and code on your website as well a regularly updating these packages to prevent bugs
    • If you use WordPress you can try out the following add-ons which perform these tasks for you: G-Zip Enabling
  • Smart loading & Caching of Data
    • If you use wordpress you can try out the following plug-ins which perform these tasks for you: WP-fastest-cache
  • Fast Webhosting
    • It’s best to shop around for the most convincing deal you can find. A serice I have personally had good experiences with is the hosting offer by GreenGeeks, a eco /renewable energy hoster (affiliate link)
  • Secure Webhosting: especially if the website includes a shop or personal data
    • Providing a mobile friendly interface by using a responsive web framework
    • Reduced file sizes: especially images throughout your web presence:
      • Image scaling: to screen/shown size as of publication anything beyond  2000px in width or height is probably overkill
      • Image compressing: by using Photoshop Tools (Paid) or RIOT Image optmizer (Free) for example.
      • Image formatting: by using new formats such as .WEPB which are ca 25% smaller than comparable .JPEG, .PNG images at comparable quality.

To measure your website speed and change results you can use the following tools

Check out some sample screen-shot below of some of my intermediary results. As you can see, I still have work to do ^^

PART 3: Gaining on-line legitimacy, trust and authority

Akin to the scientific community, a publication gains in legitimacy through the number and the quality of references, quotes i.e. “links” it gets. Humans and by extension search engines will judge the importance of a website in the same manner.

To collect and to measure the number of backlinks referring back to your website domain, you can see the number and quality on backlink checkers such ahrefs.com

From my experience this is an area where there are no tricks or quick & easy solutions that will help in a sustainable fashion (for example by using dubious content networks to post your domain across all etc.) since search Engines are constantly being further developed to identify these strategies.  

So, in order to promote the website, you can look at the different tactics to place your “signature/domains” links – which all essentially boil down to various techniques of networking:

  • Obtain exposure/guest posts/interviews in relevant magazines and media outlets
  • Sign-up on various reference social networks and contribute/fill in your profile referencing back to your domain*
  • Getting listed in/on local directory as well as on the various map applications

Last but not least remember to have fun along the way, the internet is a layer cake of different technologies and the outcome of you experiments can sometimes be unpredictable ?

For further useful tools and link head over to my resources page.  I am happy to hear your feedback if this compilation helped you! Cheers, Boris

ADDENDUM BACKLINK SEO LIST: for photographers and visual artists some good places to start setting up profiles & backlinks to your site are:

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