What makes a great website? Such a question is not hard to answer at all considering the wealth of information online especially about how to create a high-quality website. Below are some of the secrets to succeeding in the digital business landscape.
#1 Check content uniqueness
Content uniqueness is one of Google’s basic quality guidelines. Also, there are specific reasons why Google encourage website owners to use the robots.txt file and disavow tool. So, if there are duplicate contents in your website, make sure that Google is not crawling them. Enable 301 redirections or better yet, remove the duplicate pages. Ensure that the contents are viewable and readable as well.
#2 Optimize each page
Further, Google favors an orderly website. Organize your site’s structure and hierarchy. Make sure that each page is using the proper formatting tags from the title tags down to alt tags. Check the spelling and grammar of each page. Major search engines penalize websites that have too many spelling and grammar mistakes by not displaying these sites on results pages. There should be short paragraphs and short sentences as well. Use bullet points and number lists. Check the images as well. Images and illustrations must be relevant to the main topic of the page.
#3 Minimize ads above-the-fold
Excessive ads not only slows down your site, but they also affect a great user experience. Basically, ads ruin the momentum and they steal the attention that should be on your contents instead. An ad below-the-fold is okay. If you are going to puts ads on your site, block their crawlability by putting a robots.txt file.
#4 Improve site speed
Page speed is a technical guideline. Thus, a regular monitoring of your website’s speed is a must. You may use Google’s page speed tool. If you discovered your website is rather slow, optimize its load times. Google offers information on which elements in your website is actually slowing it. It also offers recommendations to speed up your site.
#5 Be mobile responsive
Mobile usage is increasingly becoming a critical factor in web design lately. For instance, since Aprill, it is already considered a sin if your website is not mobile-friendly. You can analyze your site’s mobile responsiveness on Google Webmasters Tools (GWT). GWT also offers suggestions on how you can improve how your site appears on mobile devices.
#6 Install social widgets
In making the most of your site and your social profiles as well, your site and its contents must be shareable. If possible, allow your users to register or subscribe on your site using their own social networking accounts. In this way, they won’t be discouraged to engaging with your site. Put the social widgets on visible parts of the site. Include a clear call-to-action so visitors would share your site’s contents.
#7 Keep it spam-free
Spams are a staple of low-quality websites. Broadly, you should update your site’s software. Specifically, monitor the performance of your blog page. Moderate the comments and delete inappropriate and spam comments.
#8 Remove site errors
High bounce rates, or the percentage of visitors leaving your website without exploring it, are usually due to errors. The most common error is 404 (page not found). Thus, ensure that the external and internal links are working and that each point to the right page. Use relevant anchor texts as well.
In sum, the above guidelines can help you earn Google and other search engine’s trust and vote of confidence. Surely, there are many other tips on how you can make your site of better quality than it is now. The bottom-line is you must know what distinguish a high-quality website from a low-quality one.
