Building a Quality Website

(for both search engines and visitors)

The major search engines are constantly changing the importance (or lack thereof) of different elements they use to rank sites. Sometimes things change so rapidly it’s hard for the average Internet marketer to keep up with what’s going on. Here are 5 quick tips to build a quality website that will stand the test of time. The search landscape was littered with the wreckage of hundreds of thousands of sites that were recently depressed by the Google “Panda” update. None of my sites were impacted by Panda – here are a few reasons why:

Bad Templates: Too many websites use a template to build out their website. I have seen some very large companies that could easily afford to build a custom mega-site, but for reasons I don’t understand, they use a free template. Each template has a unique footprint that can be easily identified by search engines. If the template you are using has also been used by 10,000 other sites – your lovely website may appear to be lacking in quality. If you can’t bother to have a distinct marketing product maybe you shouldn’t be ranking for those coveted, valuable keywords. Put some quality into your website and don’t use an off the shelf template.

Page/Website Load Time: Yeah, average SEO people have been debating this for several years. Professional SEO people have KNOWN that it was a part of the search algo or that it had a secondary impact on search engines – If your page is slow the search bots will not stick around long and thus will not properly index your pages. Of course, now that Google has admitted that load time is a part of their search technology everyone is trying to optimize their pages for speed.  Load time is a no brainer – if something annoys the visitor it’s going to have the same effect on Google/Bing/Yahoo.

Content Above the Fold: This may be a part of the recent Panda update, but it also may have always had a slight impact on search results. Google does a good job of detecting where content is located on a page. So, if you have a top flashing banner, some navigation links below that followed by two Adsense blocks and then have some content that is sandwiched between two side advertisements – you may have a problem.  Likewise, if your company logo is huge and your home page has giant artwork that take up most of the real estate leaving very little text content – you may also have a problem.  I will repeat the ongoing theme – if something is going to annoy the visitor it will likely have the same effect on Google.

Duplicate Content: This has been a well known issue for many years, but many websites are still built in such a manner that duplicate content is created. Surprisingly, many large company websites seem to be especially prone to duplicate content issues. The most common way for duplicate content to enter a website is from a poorly coded CMS and not having an internal linking policy. Unfortunately, this tends to be the rule rather than the exception.

User Behavior: Having satisfied users is becoming more and more critical to attracting search engine traffic. In the past, a bad experience was not that big of a deal. Maybe some visitors would not return, but good rankings ensured there was a steady flow of new traffic. Today, the search engines track, through their own toollbars installed on visitor browsers, things such as how many pages someone visited, how long they stayed and how much they used the site. When you add that data with the various trusted review site information and it’s easy to see how a search engine could build a strong profile on how useful a website is to its visitors. A poor performing website probably does not belong at the top of the search engines if there are other quality sites availabe.

If you build our your website and try to follow the suggestions above it will go a long way towards ensuring that your site attracts quality search engine traffic. There are many more things that need to be done in competitive industries, but these 5 actions carry a lot of weight in today’s modern search environment.

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