This guide is designed to provide you with detailed advice and information that will improve the overall quality of your website and help your website to be found, indexed and ranked on Google.
Earlier in the series, we focused on bringing you design and content guidelines, such as the importance of text hyperlinks, the relevance of an XML Sitemap and the implications of broken links. next, we shifted our focus to the technical aspect, including specific information about crawling, session IDs, Robots.txt and more.
In this guide we’re going to talk to you in depth about quality. In other words, the techniques and tactics you need to avoid to ensure that your website is operating to the highest of standards. When you do this, you provide a superior user experience to your visitors, which consequently helps you to rank better than other, less honest websites.
Google has become increasingly stringent over the years with regards to how websites operate and the practices they adopt to succeed. Their algorithms have become more and more advanced in order to detect illicit behaviour, to the extent that a website may be removed entirely from Google’s search engine results pages in the event that it is considered spammy.
Outlined below are 3 basic principles for a high-quality website:
Focus on the user first
Traditionally, websites focused almost entirely on search engines simply to be ranked more highly. User experience hardly held any importance and website developers went to great measures to get their sites ranked highly, adopting illicit practices such as keyword stuffing, content theft and clickbait headlines.
Today, the rules have changed significantly and it is no longer acceptable to disregard the user in favour of the search engine. User experience is of utmost importance and a website needs to focus on the user first before thinking about what the search engine wants. A positive user experience goes hand in hand with a positively ranking website, so when a website concentrates on the user, this naturally leads to better search engine results anyway.
Avoid tricks designed to impress search engines
Everything you do on your website needs to be honest and genuine. There’s no use adopting practices designed to impress search engines, because not only will the search engines detect this behaviour, but you also run the risk of putting off your users and tarnishing their experience of your website. This will quickly lead them to turn to a competitor.
Focus on what makes you different
To succeed in this competitive online world you need to focus on what makes your website different. What makes it stand out from the crowd? Is there a practice in particular that you adopt that has proven successful, that your competitors are not doing? Find your business’ unique selling point and exploit it across your website.
About 8 Ways Media
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