Developing a website is no longer simply about the aesthetics, but web designers must take into account how they can optimise their website engagement and drive traffic to the site. There’s no point having a visually stunning website that no one will see. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) needs to be at the centre of your website to help you to make the best of it. Google rewards sites that engage their audience. Key factors are therefore a high click through rate and a low bounce rate. Here are 6 ways to boost your audience and website engagement.

Engaging content and topics

What you talk about will have a strong bearing on the your level of website engagement. Make sure that alongside key information pages that you include plenty of engaging content such as imagery, infographics, whitepapers and embeddable content. This could be in the form of a blog, which will allow you to talk about industry-related topics and get your visitors thinking and talking. Talking about things your audience will be interested in, as well as your own news and products, is likely to spark more interest. It is also a clever way to make sure that you’re including keywords.

Incorporate keywords

Keywords have a large bearing on SEO results, but only if they’re used properly. They must be in context and fit naturally within the content you’re sharing, for example in your blog posts you’ll naturally mention industry terms in discussion. Forcing key words into content will actually have a negative impact on your SEO, and put your audience off of reading what you have to say if it doesn’t flow. One extra way to get your keywords into your content is by tailoring your titles, <h2> and header tags and links to ensure that they contain the topic keyword. Group keywords into keyword themes so that a single page may be able to target multiple longtails.

Keep titles short and snappy

Have you ever tried to read something on your phone that has a title that is just too long to read in one single page? As well as on mobile devices, Google searches will only show less than 60 characters of a title within the search. Keep your titles under this limit to show readers what they’re clicking through to, and make it user-friendly by staying short and snappy. This is also true for your summary, and meta description which will be displayed in related search results too.

Work behind the scenes

Just as these elements are worked on behind the scenes, there are other hidden things that you can add to the pages on your website that will affect visibility. This is called meta data, and it allows you to attach related keywords as tags to each page, so that it is found more easily in organic searches. On some devices and browsers, images and other elements may not appear as they should on your site. For this reason, ALT tags are important, since these will show only in place of the image if it is not able to appear normally. These are hidden when the image is visible, but are seen by Google and impact SEO, whilst making your pages more visitor-friendly for all users.

Link it all together

The machine of your website will run more smoothly once everything is working together at its optimum. Linking has always been relevant to SEO, and can make your site easier to navigate and find specific things. Create custom links to pages across your site to make them easily accessible. You will be able to shift the link value of a page to other content on your site by creating internal hyperlinks. This also applies for each of the pages on your site – the URL should relate to what the page is about and contain full words instead of a combination of numbers and symbols.

Use other tools to boost your website engagement

You know the great content we were talking about earlier? Well, you can use external tools to boost it even more. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus are the four key social media platforms for sharing your content, which will drive your customer engagement even further and encourage discussion. Content amplification using social media is a great way to get your audience engaged and sharing your site’s content. Google also provides their own tools including Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to help you see what is successful about your site, and what can be improved further.

Which social media platform is best for your business?

Half the battle with boosting engagement is knowing what parts of your website are drawing significantly more traffic than others, have you ever considered an IP tracking tool before?