Get Your Site Ready For 2012

First released in February 2011, Google Panda algorithm will continue to rank web pages based upon their bounce rates in 2012. Bounces are visitors to your website who land a page and exit from it without navigating to a second page because it doesn’t live up to their expectations in terms of information relevance and user experience. Having a 0% bounce rate is impossible but as long as it remains below 25% it is fine for your site. However, there are many more reasons why pages aren’t ranked high even though they contain relevant information.

Reason 1: Too clean or too overwhelmed with images
Website design can be a make or break factor to your bounce rates. Ideally, it should meet the needs and requirements of both users and bots. While plain text is a firm favourite with Google Panda, users usually respond better to pages with visuals effects. Pages made for search engine bots will likely arouse little human interest and sites designed specifically for web surfers will be hard for bots to index. Moderation can be the best policy in this case, with the ratio of relevant text to images being 1:1.

Reason 2: Incompatible with different browsers
According to a November 2011 study, 38.1% of the online community use Firefox, 33.4% stick to Chrome, 21.2% prefer Internet Explorer, 4.2% of users browse through sites via Safari and only 2.3% opt for Opera. Specialists in web design in Market Harborough recommend testing your site functionality across all the browsers available to catch every potential customer. The message saying “best viewed on ...” at the top of your page will unlikely work because no one is going to switch from a browser they have got used to just to open your site.

Reason 3: Too slow to download
Page speed is a crucial factor both for search engine rankings and the user’s web experience. No Internet surfer is going to wait minutes for your page to open or your shopping cart to load. Keep your page speed above the 80 score mark on a Google’s free scale but target 90+ to live up to the user’s and Panda’s expectations to the full.

In 2012 the trends will shift and the user’s web experience is expected to play a more important role in search engine rankings. Google Panda was designed to identify low quality pages with relevant keywords and high quality sites with inappropriate information as both scenarios can add to the user’s negative experience on the web. Keep in mind that good design can keep the user happy, the marketer in the black and search engine rankings high.

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