Effective Ways to Improve the Quality of Your Website

By improving the quality of your website, Google will perceive your website to be authoritative and user-friendly. Your website will rank highly on the Google search results pages, as a result, and this means a constant stream of traffic. In 2012 and 2013, Google unleashed their Panda and Penguin algorithms. You may have heard of businesses who collapsed after these algorithm releases. These algorithms severely reduced the rankings of websites that were “low-quality”, in terms of Google’s eyes. Most low quality websites lost all their traffic overnight.

In the future, having a high quality website will help establish trust with Google and will ensure that all your online marketing efforts will reward you with much traffic and customers. It’s certainly fundamental to know that by having a high-quality website, you’ll set a solid foundation that will be easy to build on in the years to come.

1. Lots of Text In Your Content and Pages

When Google bots are scanning your website to be indexed in the search results, they scan the main keywords and phrases. This means that the more content you have on your pages, the more words the Googlebot will be able to scan through. Google likes to see pages with lots of text (even a few paragraphs per page is enough), because it displays that you want to serve the user with as much helpful information as possible. If your pages have lots of pictures and little text, the bot won’t be able to scan anything, and your website will be viewed as a low quality website.

You don’t need to be writing pages of text, but a few paragraphs per page is sufficient. If you run an ecommerce store/business and have pages with product lists, you can include a few paragraphs at the top of the page about the type of product.

2. Avoid Ads “Above The Fold”

If you have placed ads on your website, either through Google AdSense or with another platform, avoid placing them “above the fold.” This basically means the first screenshot the user gets of your website: ie, when you arrive at a website and don’t scroll any further. By placing a lot of ads in this area, Google will think that your sole aim is to have people click your ads and then leave.

Avoid popup ads and ads that take up large spaces.

3. Provide High Quality Content

When you are writing content for your blog, make sure that it is above 600 words (ideally, keep it above 800 words) and that it contains helpful, useful information for the reader. If you just write blog posts in order to gain traffic, but your articles aren’t informative or useful, your website could be penalized as a result.

Avoid rehashing material that already exists on the web. If you are writing about a heavily-written topic, try and add your own personality and flair to your writing. Include statistics or fun facts, in order to add an entertainment value to your reader. If pictures and video can help enliven the user experience, you can add those, too.

Above all, avoid writing short (550 words or less would be considered short) articles that provide little value. To start attracting more backlinks to your site, you need to create “linkable” content, ie: content which people want to link to.

4. Avoid Black Hat/Grey Hat Practices

Some SEO companies or websites may encourage “Grey hat” practices. This might include creating doorway pages, keyword stuffing (adding hundreds of keywords to each page), cloaking (hiding keyword stuffing by making the text the same colour as the actual webpage) and buying links. These practices are finally outdated and they can get your website penalized heavily. If you avoid these practices, the Penguin and Panda algorithms will ensure that you’ll stay in the search results.

Conclusion

Having a high quality website establishes trust with Google. Once you’ve set a solid foundation, your website will continue to grow and prosper. Once you make a habit of creating high quality blog posts, focusing on giving your user a great user experience, your website will be on the path to total trust with Google and continuous prosperity.