How to ensure that your website is understandable.

It’s important to create a website that is understandable to both people and search engines. This is because search engines find articles for people, but they are unable to decipher a web page in the same way that a person does. Site usability plays a big part in how well a person understands the message that a website is trying to deliver.

The importance of site usability
Search engines are much more advanced than they were ten years ago, but they are still fairly limited. A search engine can only take a limited number of variables into account, such as keywords, site structure and links. Search engines are not able to view pictures or watch videos, and while they can understand keywords, they struggle to understand big chunks of text. Because of this, there are lots of websites that are mostly ignored. While they look interesting and useful to people, search engines can’t understand them, so they become less visible online.

However, search engines can use user engagement metrics, linking patterns and machine learning to understand more about a website. This helps to promote websites that can be understood by both people and search engines, as people are unlikely to link other people to a bad website.

It is possible for every website owner to create a useful, interesting website that can be understood by both search engines and people. This will help to improve your website ranking and traffic.

Creating quality content

Engagement metrics
Engagement metrics will give you an insight into how usable your website is. When you use a search engine, it delivers a page of results for you to choose from. If you click on the first link and immediately go back to the search page, that indicates to the search engine that you were dissatisfied with the website. However, if you click the second link and browse the website for half an hour, the search engine will judge the website to be of a higher quality, so it may move up the rankings.

This is why you must make sure that your site is easy to navigate and user friendly. If people consistently browse your website, search engines will rank your website highly.

Linking patterns
Search engines also look for linking patterns. This is because popular web pages and articles are linked to many times by other sites, so search engines can safely assume that a webpage that has been multiple inbound links is useful and interesting. This means that your website will be ranked higher if people share links to pages on your site.

Machine learning
In 2011, Google started using human evaluators to rate thousands of websites based on their quality. Google then used machine learning to mimic the humans, so the computer can accurately predict low quality websites. This also affects website ranking.