Whenever you're working with your website, it's important to consider SEO in every decision that you make. Whether it be content, design, navigation, or load time, you want to optimize for your readers first, but keep Google bots at a close second. The better SEO you have the higher you will rank on a Google SERP, the more visibility you will earn, the more clicks you will receive, the more conversions you'll see. It's a domino effect, and SEO is that first push you need.
If you're dabbling in the newly popular infinite scrolling, this idea still remains. In dealing with Infinite Scrolling, the use of SEO is going to be absolutely essential.
What Is Infinite Scrolling, and Why Does It Matter?
For those who are unfamiliar, infinite scrolling is something a website can adopt so that new information is always loading on a page. This means that readers can continually scroll down the page and new information will always appear (it's infinite). There is no need to click off of the page and wait for something to load to see more information. The information will be loading right there on the page allow a user to just scroll down to see. Social networks such as Facebook are masters of infinite scrolling.
A few benefits of infinite scrolling include:
- Real-Time Information. If your website has real-time information coming through, infinite scrolling is a great way to keep everything updated and allow users to scroll through easily. This is a big reason why almost all of the major social networks, including Google+, Twitter, and Facebook, use infinite scrolling.
- Large Amounts of Data. If your website has large amounts of data, especially data coming to you in real-time such as your tweets or Facebook posts, infinite scrolling gives you an easy way to manage it all.
- Mobile. Infinite scrolling began right around the mobile phenomenon. As more people because to browse the web on their mobile phones, the more businesses saw a need to make scrolling easier. Mobile phones have a small, vertical screen, so information began to be presented more vertically. Infinite scrolling was a no-brainer.
There are, however, many negatives to infinite scrolling. Many find that it is overwhelming to have to continually scroll down to find what they want. There is no sense of a stopping point, and many users don't find this appealing (part of the reason Google has yet to adopt this on their SERPs). It's distracting and exhausting, so as a business owner you have to consider whether or not your type of site and the content you are displaying would really benefit from this practice.
SEO Tips for Infinite Scrolling
When it comes to SEO, there is one major thing to keep in mind. It's really all about making it easy for search engine bots to crawl your site by creating static URLs for each page. Think of it like a comprehensive HTML sitemap except your links aren't just accessible through a footer link. Below examples:
- Static URLs. You want to make sure that your infinite scroll is built on top of paginated pages (like your archive pages). This means that there should be static links in the backend of your site that take bots from one page to another (unlike what you would see if you were a user). This makes it much easier for bots to crawl your site.
How to Make It Happen: You can tell if you are making it easy for your site to be crawled by disabling JavaScript and then looking to see if there are links to static archive pages, usually organized by year and/or by month. You can also organize this by topic instead, if that makes more sense for your website.
Whatever your reason for wanting to try infinite scrolling on your website, remember that SEO needs to be a priority. You can visit the WordPress plugin directory to download the infinite-scroll plugin and get started.
What are your thoughts on infinite scrolling? How do you feel as a user? How do you feel as a website considering this avenue?