UX and Content
With Google's ranking factor Panda, user experience is beginning to take center stage. Google wants to focus on helping users find high quality sites that provide good user experience. To fulfill this goal you need to create a professional, interesting, informative site that makes users want to visit, share and return.
Create a site that is well designed. Include relevant well written content along with corresponding quality interesting visual media. Each page's structure and labeling should clearly indicate its purpose and relevancy.
Panda
Algorithum | PageRank | Penguin
Panda is not a new algorithm it is a ranking factor. It is named after engineer Navneet Panda. It was introduced in the states in February 2011 and went into effect for all English speaking users April 2011. In August 2011 Panda went global.
With the roll-out of Panda the user experience becomes a large part of the equation. Panda is a combination of ranking factors which take into consideration high quality content over low quality content.
With Panda the rating appears to be based on the entire site rather than an individual page therefore you need to make sure that all of your pages are high quality, either take out or rewrite those that need work.
Google used a control group of human site raters and compiled what they liked about certain sites. This information was then comprised into very complicated ranking factors.
Although the ranking factors are a tightly held secret some of the factors are.
- User Experience
- Interesting, quality content
- Error Free
- Load Time
- Popularity
- Bounce rate: the percentage of users who leave the site (bounce) without viewing other pages within the site.
- Length of time a user stays on the site - which indicates user interest
- Returning users
- Social Media - most social media sites have nofollow but Google does track traffic from social media sites (started spring 2012)
- Clicks from Organic Search Results
- Duplicated content - negative
- Grammar or spelling errors - negative
- To many advertisments - negative
Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content 'above-the-fold' can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward .Page Layout Algorithm Improvement Matt Cutts, Google
Panda runs about every 30 days and is updated periodically.
Professional Site
Create a professional, interesting, informative site that makes users want to visit, share and return. Create a site that is well designed. Include relevant well written content along with corresponding quality interesting visual media.
Page Structure
The search engines should be able to recognize what your site is about from each page's structure and all of the pages in relationships to each other. Each page's structure and labeling should clearly indicate its purpose and relevancy.
- Labeling is important -
- Meaningful headings
- Meaningful lists
- Meaningful file names that indicate the purpose of the page
- Meaningful links (the anchor text must be meaningful. )
- Layout
- Emphasis on quality througout especially on what appears above the fold
- Very few advertisments should appear above the fold
Page Theme
For each page stay within a theme/topic. The robots are programmed to recognize distinct topics try to recognize distinct topics which add up to an overall theme. Staying within the same theme will also make your site more coherent to users.
Popular Site
An interesting, well designed site will make your users want to stay longer and return often. Both of which will improve your site's popularity. Quality content will also encourage reputable inbound links (back-links) to your site.
Advertisements
The content should far out-weigh the amount of advertisements that are on any one page.