SEO Step-By-Step Guide– 205. Rating your website’s usability index

It is important to regularly rate your website’s usability level to make sure that all your search engine optimization efforts and your search engine marketing efforts pay a rich yield. If your website should have poor usability index, then you cannot expect good success rate despite sending good traffic to your website.
You need to look at your website’s usability from three angles one is from the perspective of the website administrator, visitor to your website and the search engines. Neither search engines nor the visitors get to see the back end of your website. So the usability index of your backend will not affect your search engine rankings. However, it is important to have a clean website and to keep your online folders free from clutter and duplicate content and files. The coding should of course comply with W3C standards.
Looking at the usability index from the perspective of the visitor to your website, every website grows, changes shape, sheds some pages over a period of time. The point here is that we do not have the same website that we had 2 years ago or 5 years ago. We constantly update our website. Sometimes the updates are done in a structured manner but in most situations, the updates are done in a haphazard way or in an unstructured manner. This can affect the quality of your website as well as the usability index of your website. When the usability index falls, your visitors will not be able to find the information they need in the shortest time or they may not be able to totally find the information that they are looking for in your website. This can affect your conversion rates directly and the number of people that leave your website in the first 30 seconds will increase. Remember that search engines try to keep track of your website statistics such as the duration spent by the visitors in your website for your keywords. So if a great percentage of visitors who come to your website using a particular keyword search leave your website in the first 30 seconds or so, then it is going to give an important cue to the search engines that your website is not the best fit for the keyword and this can reduce your ranking for that keyword in the due course. Therefore, you must make sure that you increase your visitor retention period by increasing the usability of your website and in particular the important landing pages.
The next perspective is the perspective of the search engines. Search engines should be able to crawl your website easily. You must provide clear navigation in your website so that they can crawl deep into all the pages of your website for better indexing.

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