To be a successful online business in the long run, you need to have a high quality website.
Whether you run a news blog, a content-focused website, or an e-commerce store, you need to be different and better than thousands of other websites in the same niche to achieve online success. With a high-quality website, you can achieve success over time, both for loyal readers and search engine trust that it will drive more organic visits.
For years, Google engineers have been trying to make their algorithms smart enough to identify and rank quality websites. It is not an easy task, given that everything should be decided by a computer program and not a human. However, with the launch of “Panda” a few years ago, it seems they are on the right track. The “Panda” algorithmic changes made a good job of determining which websites were better than others and gave them a higher position in SERPS.
In this article, we’ll talk about what Google sees as a high-quality website, and most importantly, what practices you need to implement to ensure your web property meets Google standards.
Please note that if a website is considered high quality by Google, it will be accepted by other search engines as well: Because Google’s standards are stricter than Bing and Yahoo.
What is a high quality website?
Over the years, the entire SEO industry has been talking about the requirement of producing high quality content and top experts have come up with “content is king”. So content is the success factor of any website.
Does it mean that a website with good content is also a high quality website? Answer is no.
Good content is not enough.
Content is one of the factors that distinguishes low quality from high quality sites (most importantly), but only good content is not considered a high quality website by Google.
What are the features of a high quality website?
A high quality website has the following features:
Unique content
Content is unique both within the website and compared to other websites. So every page has unique content and is unlike any other pages.
Demonstrate expertise
Content is produced by experts based on research and experience. For example; if the topic is health-related, qualified authors who can professionally advise on the content-related topic should be provided.
Neutral content
The content is detailed and explains both sides of a story. It does not promote a single product, idea or service.
Accessibility
A high-quality website also has versions for users outside the desktop. It is important that mobile and tablet users can access the website without any availability issues.
Usability
The user can easily navigate the website; is this website user-friendly?
Attention to detail
The content is easily readable with pictures and should not have spelling and grammatical errors. Is it understood that what is posted on the website cares by the owner or is content produced for advertising?
SEO
There are many benefits from optimizing a website for search engines, but it’s important not to exaggerate it. A quality website should also have non-optimized content.
Balance between content and ads
It’s not a bad thing for a website to have ads or promotions, but these should not prevent users from finding the information they need.
Pagespeed
A high quality website is loaded faster. A faster website will take place in higher ranks and much more audits, sales and loyal visitors will be created.
Social media
Social media has changed our lives, the way we communicate and the way we evaluate quality.
A good product is expected to have good reviews, Facebook likes and tweets. Before deciding to buy, you can also examine these social factors.
Likewise, social acceptance and recognition of a good website, i.e. Facebook followers, RSS subscribers, etc.
User engagement and interaction
Do users spend time on the site and read multiple pages before leaving? By adding comments, making suggestions, engaging in conversation, etc. Do they interact with the content?
The fact that users spend time and interact on the site will benefit from search engines’ trust.
Competition and transparency
Is your website better than your competitors when you use a specific keyword? If it is evaluated without prejudice, does it deserve one of the top positions?
How to create a high quality website?
Which practice can be applied when the upper specifications of a high quality website are taken into consideration?
We’ve shared with you tips on what you can do to improve your website quality and Google trust below.
- Check for unique content on your site.
- Move to mobile.
- Collect your content.
- Find out what readers want.
- Minimize the amount of advertisement at the top of the screen.
- Make your website loaded fast.
- Work on your social media promotion.
- Check your bounce rate.
- Control your competition.
- Keep your website healthy and spam-free.
1. Check for unique content on your site
Make sure all pages have unique content. You can use Copyscape to check all content before publishing to make sure it’s unique.
Check your existing pages and remove the page or index if you find duplicate content. If you have pages with similar content, combine them on a single page and redirect pages with 301 redirects.
2. Move to mobile
Your website must be mobile friendly. The reader’s experience matters regardless of the platform.
3. Collect your content
Check all pages for spelling and grammatical errors. Use formatting tags correctly (H1, H2, Bold etc.).
Use small paragraphs to make it easier to read. Add images or infographics to make your content more interesting and attractive.
4. Find out what readers want
Use the Google keyword planner to find out what people are looking for and give them the content they want, but avoid over-optimization.
5. Minimize the amount of ads at the top of the screen
Google penalizes websites with too many ads at the top of the screen (Fold – the point where the page is cut off from a user’s monitor or browser window). If you have good content, you can use ads in the areas at the bottom of the screen and at the end of your articles.
6. Make your website loaded fast
Check your website with the page speed tool and make sure it loads as fast as possible. Google PageSpeed Insights provides guidelines on how to increase page speed by measuring your website speed.
I know this is not the easiest task but it is very important.
7. Work on your social media promotion
Do you have a Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram page?
You can ensure customer conversion by providing traffic to your website from social media platforms. Find out how to increase website traffic with social media.
8. Check your bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website without viewing other pages.
You should aim for a low bounce rate. So check your analytics and identify and fix which pages of your site have high bounce rates.
Although bounce rate is not a ranking factor, it is definitely one that can help you build higher quality websites.
9. Check your competition
Control your competitors and try to make your content better!
The first step you need to take before creating your content is examination of your competitors. Before you write an article, you can Google to find the right keyword by looking more closely at the websites on the first page to rank the article in search results.
You can try to make your content better and more useful by controlling the content length, the authority of the website, the authority of the author.
10. Keep your website healthy and spam-free
A high quality website does not contain spam. One of the mistakes made by major websites (like newspapers) is not checking their comments. As a result, you will see many spam comments below their articles with no good user experience.
As a general rule, you should keep your website updated for software updates and monitor and delete spam/inappropriate comments.
The above guidelines are the steps you should consider in producing websites that can be trusted and considered high quality by Google.
Always keep your website up to date, produce good content, understand the user’s expectations from you and be loyal to your digital marketing strategies.
