Why does your business must have an above average website?
As an ever-growing number of people turn to the internet as their primary means of accessing information, your website will be the first impression most of the world has of you and your business. Maintaining a good website is of critical importance, then. Luckily, as widespread use of the internet moves into its third decade, we have a broad pool of information to pull the characteristics of a good website from.
Search Engine Optimization
A good website is a website, first and foremost, that internet browsers can find. You can have the most attractive, most user friendly, most brilliantly thought out website, and if people can not find it, it means nothing. In order to understand how internet browsers are directed to websites, you have to understand search engine optimization (SEO). To understand search engine optimization, you have to understand how search engines work. Think of search engines like Google as answer machines. Which answers you get as search results depend on SEO. You put in a question, the search engine runs into the internet scanning vast amounts of information, and comes back with suggestions for where the answer might be found.
Search engine optimization is the process by which you increase your likelihood that the search engine picks you as a likely candidate to have the right answer. The official way to say this is search engines create indexes of websites ranked by relevance. The higher the relevance to a browser’s question the search engine thinks your website possesses, the higher the search engine will rank your website. The higher your ranking, the more people will see your webpage.
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The key to understand is the websites that rank on the top of the search engine results don’t get there by accident.
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Do you want a professional to help you with your website? Contact us now.
Content is King
How do you get search engines to rank your website higher than your competitors? You fill your website with the most, the best, and the freshest content. Say, for example, you are researching how to build a good website and you enter the term, “characteristics of a good website” into the search engine. The search engine is going to comb through all the information on the internet looking for that phrase. Maintaining enough content with the information your target audience is looking for is essential for a successful website.
Simple, Attractive Design
Having loads of content is not enough. You might be able to trick a search engine into ranking your website higher based on the amount of sheer information your website possesses, but you might not be able to keep human eyes glued to your website. So, you also need to organize and present your content in a simple, attractive, professional manner. People naturally assume that clean, organized space is indicative of professional authority and success. This is just as true in an office building as it is for your website. Hire a professional to build your website.
User Friendly Navigation
Another one of the characteristics of a good website that sometimes goes overlooked is the importance of user friendly navigation. You want your audience to be able to find the information they came to your website looking for. Before you design your website, spend some time mapping out how you want the website to look paying close attention to the way information will be presented. Web designers use an organizational technique called “wireframing” that could be compared to outlining a piece of writing. Build a solid wireframe and ask your business partners and friends to look at it and tell you if it feels intuitive to them.
Do you want a professional to help you with your website? Contact us now.
photo credit: SWCompiegne 2015