Act like you deserve your top spot in Google!

Modern approaches to NSO (post meta keyword stuffing) encompass many overlapping disciplines such as PR, User Experience (UE) and good design.

So many people in the SEO field (client side web-masters especially) fail to take note of the UE side of well…UE!

Accessibility always seems to get taken into account as this is something which can be partly remedied by good use of semantic HTML, CSS and things such as skip links, access keys and legends around forms.

Website IA (information architecture) from an NSO perspective is also another factor which gets ticked in the NSO check list. The one trick that many web-masters miss (intentionally most of the time) is thinking about what content users want to see.

If you’re not providing your users with good content then you are essentially delivering a bad  user experience.

I was recently carrying out some searches in Google for a clients research document and I queried “used car kent”. You only have to click on the top three search results in order to see that the quality of information being delivered is quite poor.

Try the search yourself (Google UK).

The top three results contained pages full of links and search forms with accompanying content that was keyword rich and not very informative.

Serving your users with weak content is not innovative use of a good rankings and I guess if we had access to their analytics packages we would see high bounce rates from Google traffic.

So who is doing a good job? Off the top of my head I would say Amazon, I did a search for “brand planning book” and they came up in position one with a landing page which, had the exact item I was looking for and alternative books with user reviews.

All in all a positive UE for Amazon users. Amazon may slip up on other aspects of UE as I am no UE expert, however I believe the basics are in place as the content they serve website visitors is essentially useful! Surprise, Surprise!

The natural search landscape is becoming more competitive YOY as YOY CPC inflation on paid search hits clients harder. Websites who have dominated natural search results for years should now invest in innovative content strategies in order to keep their rankings and better convert/retain the traffic they receive.