Can the User-Friendliness of Your Website Affect Your Search Engine Rankings?

If you are wondering if how your website performs for visitors affects how major search engines rank your website, you may be surprised to learn that there are direct connections between the two. If your website is easy to use, search engines may be more apt to give you a higher search engine ranking than if it is not.

It seems as though search engines such as Yahoo are taking advantage of a new application that can help them determine how user friendly your website may be. It can track the design on your website and add that to the number of factors that major search engines utilize when giving rankings to websites. In essence, websites that have better usability and are easier to navigate through generally have not only much higher quality but also a higher conversion rate than their cluttered counterparts. The new application that Yahoo is using compiles a list of 51 factors that it uses to determine how usable a website is. Below are a few examples of those criteria.

• How Ads are Positioned on your web pages
• The amount of words on your site
• The amount of links on your site
• The amount of images that are not from ads
• The total area of your page
• The length of your page
• How many columns you have for each table
• How many text ads are present
• How many image ads are present
• How many image ads are above the fold of the webpage
• How many image ads are below the fold of the webpage
• How many text ads are above the fold of the webpage
• How many text ads are below the fold of the webpage
• How many sponsored ads are present
• How many sponsored ads are above the fold of the webpage
• How many sponsored ads are below the fold of the webpage
• How many internal ads are present
• How many internal ads are above the fold of the webpage
• How many internal ads are below the fold of the webpage
• How many external ads are present
• How many external ads are above the fold of the webpage
• How many external ads are below the fold of the webpage
• How much of your page is used for ads
• The area of ads above the fold of your webpage

Other search engines such as Google also use similar applications to determine the rankings. If you want your website to be high ranking, make sure you have excellent visibility and that you have very limited clutter on your website. If you are getting lots of visitors to your site, but not a lot of sales it may be time to take another look at the design of your webpage and make the necessary changes to ensure high ranking with the search engines.

About The Author: Sarah Folgea from Aceinternetmarketing.ie specializes in writing articles relating to the online Business Industry and search engine Ranking . Visit her website at www.aceinternetmarketing.ie.