User Engagements have a crucial role in SEO. A simple common sense is required to identify the significance of user engagements. User engagements are happening for a reason.

What are all user engagements?

Simple answer is: Everything that a user does on your website.

Some common user engagements are:

• Mouse move
• Mouse click
• Mouse right click
• Mouse down
• Mouse up
• Scroll
• Keypress
• KeyDown
• KeyUp

Why user engagements occur?

A simple rule is that, when a website seem to be a gold mine in user perspective, they will try to dig deeper with their engagements on the website. So user engagement is the result of a valuable website with many interactions possible for users.

Importance of user engagements

The user engagements are real signs to know whether the website is good or bad. Also it determines the rank in search results and social media.

Each user engagement is precious to improve rankings, but manipulated engagements are never appreciated. So the engagements can be classified into good or bad engagements. Good engagements improve ranking whereas bad engagements never improve ranking also it may lower ranking.

How to get user engagements that are good for rankings?

Here are 7 strategies to get user engagements. Please note that the time between each engagement is very important. More time between engagements are mostly considered as good user engagements.

1. Setup website information architecture properly

Think of users as busy people and they have a lot of options to choose from. They are interested in a website if it has a great information architecture, otherwise they choose other options.

In any website, there should be at least some information, the more the information, the more it is required to apply architecture styles.

Information architecture includes everything the basic SEO practices have. Apart from that additional data or sections can be included in each page if the page isn’t complete without it. Also you can add some good to have sections to make the page more yummy.

Depending on the context and business nature, different types of elements can be included to provide different perspectives to the content or additional support to the users while using the website.

How will this help increase user engagements?

Great information architecture will help users navigate through your website according to their needs with ease.

2. Develop your website with users in mind.

If you are starting on a new website, design the sections according to the taste of its users. Don’t try to copy from another website. Instead of copying the entire website, do some research and find out what works for your users.

List out every feature that the users love to have on your website. This helps you to develop your website which is capable of providing great user experience.

How will this help increase user engagements?

When you develop your website according to the users, the website will become great for them. Thus they will love your website, which increases user engagements. Moreover they will return to your website the next time.

3. Ensure each page of your website serves the purpose.

List out the reason behind the creation of your website. If all of them are properly implemented then skip this step. If any of the items are pending, update your website with necessary changes.

How will this help increase user engagements?

Once the purpose of your website is clear and visible, it would be easier to use. It will help users to understand the website better. Thus they will engage more with your website.

4. Add new features/content regularly

Websites should be evolving all the time. Anything that helps users, can be added to the website regularly. It can be content or features. Users will love to use such websites and it helps to maintain the freshness of the website also.

How will this help increase user engagements?

This may help increase user engagements, on the other hand it helps to increase time in between each engagement. Thus the user engagements become more valuable.

5. All elements of the website should have a common theme and property.

The main reason behind the website to have a common theme and property is that users have less time spending on your website on his/her first visit. In that short time users will learn to use your website or they plan to find another website. If the user learns to use your website, they continue to use it.

The goal should be, everything on your website has to interpret easily.

How will this help increase user engagements?

When user learns to use your website, they tend to spend more time on the page. This increases chances of more engagements. Common property in the website will help increase similar and repeated engagements.

6. Improve page speed

This cannot be avoided, due to its importance in on-page optimization and technical SEO. You might have read about this in many SEO guides.

To check your webpage speed use PageSpeed Insights tool from Google. It will show all the opportunities to improve page speed and guide you to fix the issues.

How will this help increase user engagements?

Almost all users are busy, they wish to have the need quickly. Improving 1% speed in your website will significantly increase engagements.

7. Redesign the page if required.

This should be done only if all other methods don’t work. If you had tried other methods and not received the expected user engagements then it’s time for a redesign. Hire a professional for website redesign according to the above SEO strategies.

How will this help increase user engagements?

A redesign will help to avoid the elements and sections that didn’t work before and add new sections for experiments. The redesign can be useful to change the site structure and to change mobile and desktop user experience. Thus it will increase user engagements.

Thanks for reading 🙂 Hope you learned the SEO strategies for user engagements.

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Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is the optimization of website for search engines, but nowadays SEO has become more broader in optimizations. For example the less important thing in a web page has influence in SERP.

Now in Search Engine Optimization there are no specific rules for every SEO factor of a web page. There are rules for specific factors, but others have guidelines only. Guidelines are good to have because it helps us to make websites based on the best practices.

If you are new to SEO then you should first optimise your website with the basic SEO factors that are essential for the success of any website. You can find a lot of resources online for basic SEO.

Let’s focus on the less noticed sections in a website that has a lot of importance in SERP. This article is a reminder to use the blank spaces in the pages properly.

White or Blank spaces

White spaces (Dark spaces for dark themed websites 😀 ) are very good.

You may wonder how?

Because it’s very good for the eyes.

When there are more blank spaces we feel less stressed, more comfortable and enjoyable reading the page even if the content is a little bit boring.

It also helps to view the web page more clearly and it helps to view each section more easily for the users. It will be attractive to the users. Thus improves the UX of the website.

Also there are a lot of benefits for this. Among those very crucial and unnoticed is SEO benefits.

SEO benefits of blank spaces

Everyone loves to buy neat and Elegant laptops and smartphones. No one wish to have a ugly gadget. Because people like beauty naturally. There are lot of factors that make a laptop or smartphone Elegant. One of them is the placement of blank spaces.

In the same way in websites also people love to see content with blank spaces and it makes users feel like using the same look and feel of their device.

For example, does anyone like to use a keyboard that has all keys tightly fitted and key size the same as each alphabet? NO.

Like this there are a lot of examples we can see in our daily life.

In the same way users like and need blank spaces to use your website. The more perfect the use of blank space in your website the more would be the SEO rankings. Because it helps to increase website usage time which is a most crucial SEO factor.

So the blank spaces are indirectly a SEO factor. In other words, blank spaces have to be carefully placed and in the right proportion in order to reduce bounce rate and increase traffic.

How much is required

Maximum blank space is the best, at the same time the page should have valuable things. Let’s take Google as our example. We all know about Google home page. In the result page also it has a lot of blank spaces.

You can find some real examples by yourself.

• Take a list of high traffic websites.
• Checkout each one for the blank spaces
• Try calculating the proportion of blank spaces with content on each of those sites.

How to optimise blank spaces in your website

1. Remove unwanted sections from the page — It can be moved to another page
2. Add more margins and paddings
3. Increase letter spacing and line height if required — make sure it matches the page and context.
4. Increase font size or change font
5. Scroll through the page and ensure each section has maximum blank space without losing the UI beauty.
6. Use the best standard styles for link underlines.