You might think that the most attractive and eye-catching websites available online are the most popular to visitors. Although the aesthetic your site is important, search engines and unique visitors favor sites where the quality of layout and content of your pages is very high. By keeping your site simple, with informative and interesting content, you can increase your SEO significantly and can keep visitors on your pages longer.

Here are the top 5 tips for making your website more search engine friendly while making it more accessible for its users:

1. Improve the layout of your webpage. You want to make sure your homepage is clear and in a simple layout. You should make all of your links and navigation tools easy to find showing visitors, at a first glance, where they can go and how to find out what they are looking for. Make sure to use bullets, tables, bars, white spaces, and margins appropriately to make your website seems less cluttered. Always put your most important information at the top of the webpage so your visitors can see it without scrolling and your paragraphs should be less than 100 words for easy scans of the content.

2. Keep your webpage short in length. Physically longer websites take more time to load and also require your visitors to scroll for your information. Allow your visitors to find what they are looking for on your site without scrolling if possible. If scrolling does become necessary, make sure you add easy navigation buttons to enable visitors to jump directly to all of your pages. Recommendations include: keeping your pages fewer than 32K and making sure your pages load within 8-10 seconds.

3. Keep navigation tools a priority. Navigation tools should be located in plain sight and on top of your webpage. Navigation links should be on every page and should always provide an easy link back to your homepage. If you do have a complex website, make sure to add a search function at the top of the site.

4. Keep your fonts simple! Having fonts on your site that are too complex, too large or too small for your visitors will just make it more difficult for them to read. Fonts that are great to use are default fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana because they are legible and load on any computer, anywhere. Making sure font colors, styles, and backgrounds are clear for your visitors is essential. Use underlining and bold texts to highlight the more important texts on your site.

5. Improve your site’s content. Your content should be informative but with some uniqueness to keep visitors interested. Avoid grammatical and spelling mistakes and offer many hyperlinks to allow your visitors to pursue a topic in more detail. Search engines scan your content so keep it in plain text and offer a variety of topics concerning your website’s goals.

These tips can help take your existing website and make it more user-friendly. Visitors and search engines are more concerned about the content your site offers and how to navigate through the content rather than how attractive it is. So, it is important to utilize these tips and keep your site consistent throughout.

Content provided by: www.emarketer.com
Blog Post written by: Kent Seiders