Design features as a ranking factor?

[corgi]

i created a new design of my website, very clean and highly orientated towards conversion. its a far better looking site than the old one but the navigation is almost the same. a few days after i uploaded the new site we were ranked number 1 on the biggest keyphrase in my industry.

Does google crawl design feature, maybe with something like conversion heat mapping software and include that as a ranking factor?

love your thoughts on this one.

[SimonCullum]

Hi Corey

Kind of. Search Engines don't crawl design features as such, however the ability to easily crawl pages within a website is believed to be a factor, as are other factors such as page speed.

Regarding 'conversion heat mapping', I doubt it. The closest factor that I'm aware of is Engagement, as in how visitors interact with a website;  do they spend time reading pages or bounce straight off, do visitors visit many pages on a website such as going through a research and purchase cycle, or do they not stick around for long.

So there are ranking factors here to take into account such as those mentioned above.  Check out 'The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors' which is also included in a blog post here on SEOmoz.

Regards

Simon

[AlanMosley]

Simon is correct, there is no such factor I have heard of. What i do suspect is that you had somthing in your old design holding you back. some unknown factor that was not liked by the SE's, putting up your new design has rid you of it.

Plus there is also the QDF factor, Query deserves freshness. where search results like to inclued a few sites that have new content along with the normal high ranking sites. in this case you can exspect to drop again, sorry

Between these points nad what Simon has suggested i think it can be eplained

[RobertFisher]

Simon and Alan are correct here, but there was a recent post by Dr. Pete that also sheds a bit of light on this. Quality Raters.

This is an interesting post and I have looked back at it several times. That said, when you redesigned the site, if you took off ads, got rid of superfluous information, etc. You likely improved the way the algorithm looks at it, too. As Simon said, if you improved the ability of the spiders to crawl it, that helped. As Alan said, if it is just a freshness factor it could drop again soon. So, keep it fresh and keep it simple.

By the way, this was a great question and followed by two good answers.

[SimonCullum]

Thanks Alan. A good addition to the answer by yourself there.

[SimonCullum]

Three good answers including yours Robert, lots of great help and pointers here for Corey

[SuperlativB]

The pointer that I saw as the key information in that post was that quality raters use Firefox web browser. So make sure your site is looking proper in firefox.

"I said no secrets, but I guess this is a little bit of inside information. Google raters are instructed to use Firefox, along with the web developer add-on. Do with that as you will."

[corgi]

thanks guys, really helpful. i am new to all of this as i have always paid for my SEO work but as a budding entrepreneur i can only see understanding it myself as a advantage for future ventures. i dont believe i have increased rankings just to be a fresh result because i have been hovering around the top 5 for months.

i asked this question because as the web advances, i can only see it as a good thing that SE's start to use new technologies to see what users see. the bit about conversion rate optimisation that confuses me a bit is my site converts more people quicker, with less distractions. this means a lower bounce rate but also means less time on site and less pages visited. this is why i think over time as CRO grows more poplular. SE"s may need to look at other ways to crawl design aspects of websites.

thanks again guys

[RobertFisher]

Uhhh, Corey,

You said you have always paid in the past for SEO, I know SuperlativeB and I sent invoices, did you not get invoices from Alan or Simon??? Odd, they usually send first.