According to Netcraft January 2018 Server Survey, there are over 1.8 billion websites on the internet. However, the vast internet is dominated by only a few hundred websites. The others are left behind unvisited and lie in the inner SERPs. To be more precise, there are 332 million registered domains for over 1.8 billion websites served up by 7.2 million computers.
Amidst this huge number of websites, when you publish a newly registered website, you have to work on it to bring it to the top. Quality content, SEO and SMM are considered to be the prime factors deciding a website’s ranking on SERPs. However, there are numerous other factors, out of which we are discussing a few here, capable of accelerating the page rank.
Trends in Web Development
The trends in website development that affect a website’s quality and drive traffic are discussed in this blog. The latest developments in the domain are kept in mind while pointing out the main features. Mobile-friendly websites started appearing top on Google SERPs over the past few years. Responsive websites have been the need of the hour for any business seeking online presence. Let’s see, how the trend has evolved over the period.
Google started prioritizing mobile-friendly websites as mobile searches have been consistently rising since 2009 and have surpassed desktop searches in 2018. On 26th of March, Google officially announced that it will be using Mobile First Indexing. This clearly indicates that Google indexes websites with a mobile-version, not a desktop version. Google has been continuously striving to help the largest number of searchers possible. Hence, a robust mobile search trend helps to adapt to the popular means of search.
The ‘Mobilegeddon’ update in 2015 was the one with which Google officially started indexing the search rank of mobile-friendly sites and penalizing the non-mobile-friendly websites. Studies have revealed that the sites that switched to responsive have seen a significant hike in their rankings and nearly 70% of the websites on page 1 were responsive. The trend is still on the rise and sites that are non-responsive have already hit with traffic reduction penalty.
The Arrival of Accelerated Mobile Page
The Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) is a project from Google and Twitter, designed to create fast-loading mobile pages. The project is aimed at the creation of websites and ads that are fast, appealing and high performing across various devices and distribution platforms. The AMP pages allow you to link to and control them. The AMP is compatible across the browsers and is a cross-platform project. It builds on the existing skill sets and frameworks to develop web pages.
Though the AMP helps load web pages faster, which in turn enhances usability and drives traffic, it has its own disadvantages as well. One cannot rely only on page speed for engagement since quality content is another key factor deciding the rank on SERPs. In order to make the AMP work perfectly for a website, you need to have both of these aspects — superfast page load speed & quality content.
How AMP Helps in Ranking?
With websites having the AMP pages, you can please google and it makes little easier to get higher rankings. Since the pages load faster, you will see a significant reduction in bounce rate. For instance, a site with AMP loads faster on Twitter’s native browser than which doesn’t have AMP. This in plain logic, drives in more traffic and more revenue. However, installing AMP to your website does not mean that the page will immediately get shifted to the number one position.
AMP strips down most of the complex features of a website on mobile, hence a majority of businesses step back from installing the AMP. However, the publishing sites are counted among the ones that benefit the most from the AMP. Hence, the pages publishing content can be optimized with the AMP and the rest of the pages such as product landing pages and services can be excluded. Otherwise, it might result in low conversion rates and thereby reduced revenue. The best part is to install the AMP on blogs, news or updates section.
Cons at a glance:
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Need to use a streamlined version of CSS
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JavaScript is not allowed
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Cause images to lazy load
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Reduce Ad revenue
Pros at a glance:
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Increased website load speed
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Higher mobile ranking
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Enhanced server performance
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Superfast pages from cache
Installing the AMP in your web pages is quite easy but takes much time doing it manually, especially if on WordPress sites. You can add a line of code in your page’s header. Thus, you can make ready your site for mobile-first index. However, it is advised to select the top-priority pages and place additional tags and a line of code. Now, you can test these selected pages using the Structured Data Testing Tool by Google. Google stores your AMP pages in the cache and thus saves time in loading from the server. Contact us to explore more on the topic.