You assume your site is easily navigated, highly informative and thoroughly attractive to users. The truth is, measuring user experience on your site isn’t quite as simple an assumption, nor is it anywhere near as straight forward as measuring other components of your site.
You might be wondering just how search engines are gauging the user experience for search result rankings. Richard Vanderhurst explains in his lectures that search engines today are far superior to those over the past few decades. They are gathering loads of data and looking over hundreds of criteria for millions of sites. What should keep them from tracking users, search words and the results they utilize?
Take for instance a search on your favorite car. Whether it is popular or not, chances are hundreds of pages of search results show up. So how do you decide which result will be the most helpful? Well, the majority of people will skim through and read the small excerpts and descriptions shown under the link.
Users will most likely view the higher ranked results, but this doesn’t keep other sites down. Although search engines are rating your site on criteria in your site, the number of people that visit it adds to a higher ranking. If you and several other people click on the same site on the third page of search results, that website will soon be boosted in ranking.
In essence, it makes sense. A well-developed search engine will notice that a third page link is receiving more traffic than a first page link and it may be moved up to the second page, if not the first. Richard Vanderhurst explains that the popularity of your site is portrayed in this way and through this; search engines can monitor user experience with your site.
But the link that is clicked is not the only factor in calculating user experience. The amount of time they spend on your site is also a vital element. This means that if a user opens your link and realizes that it is not what they were looking for and clicks back to the search results page, the search engine knows it.
This is termed bounce and depending on how often and how quickly users are bouncing from your site, search engines can tell how relevant viewers are finding your site to their keywords. Search engines gauge the totally bounce of your views with your overall user experience rating and makes a final score that is then tallied into how you are ranked.
Richard Vanderhurst reminds his students that by keeping your keywords as precise to your topic as possible, you will be able to ensure a highly efficient site and very little bounce. Remember, the more bounce, the lower your rank on certain keywords, so be careful what you use. Take your time with these components and work them into unison. Don’t be afraid to try, fail and try again. Your site has its own special blend of elements and only you know how to augment them to their highest possible place. Use the art, not the science; practice blending and leave the computing to the crawlers.
