Search engines have come a long way in the last 7-10 years.
There was a time when the search results were totally dependent on on-page factors – such as primarily, the keyword density. And this led to blackhat practices like double content, keyword stuffing, for example.
Then, the search engines became more intelligent, and started giving more credit to offsite factors – like incoming links. This trend was started by Google. And this led to another practices like link exchange or link purchase.
The next step in search engine evolution was contextual sensitivity – search engines started looking at the overall context of the webpage and the website , and started evaluating the keywords in light of this. They also started evaluating the content and topic of the sites providing the backlinks, and started giving more importance to backlinks from websites about a similar topic. This move towards contextual sensitivity drastically improved the quality of results on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Nowadays, it is time for the next step in search engine evolution.
Arrival of “User Experience” on the SEO practices. “User Experience” is the mantra for the next stage of search engine evolution. Let’s remember – providing good content to searchers is the primary goal of search engines.
And when we say good content, it is not just the written word on the blog or website. Good content means easily readable, easily navigable, error-free on-topic content. This, over and above the written word, is what “User Experience” comprises of.
Since search engines have started giving importance to the overall user experience of blog or website visitors, it makes tremendous sense to improve the experience of your users in order to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
There are lots of factors that impact the overall experience of the readers of your blog or website. The best part is – almost all of them are totally in your control! More about it in my next posts.
