Quality Factors for good SEO

Google is making leaps and bounds towards making truly high-quality websites more visible in the search results. It is important to ensure you are helping clients give off the right kinds of ‘quality signals’: here are some factors worth considering.

A gorgeous design – Google can’t quite grade the looks of your website just yet but it can gauge the reaction of visitors. Good looking websites keep people engaged and stop people clicking away meaning it keeps the bounce rate low. Google utilizes user feedback metrics like bounce rate so anything you can do to improve the user experience is going to be a big win in the SEO arena.

Customised)design – it doesn’t have to be a completely custom design but it is reasonable to assume that Google looks less favorably upon websites that use free or even premium themes but do absolutely nothing to make it their own. I’d imagine that Google takes this stance because it is quite reasonable to say that a webmaster who hasn’t bothered to get the basics of a website right is unlikely to be creating something high-quality in the long run. That might be an oversimplification and a sweeping generalization but Google is trying to crunch vast swathes of data and web pages, it doesn’t have the time to individually review every page out there.

Address, privacy policy, TOS, and other brand signals – Google post-Panda is looking to promote ‘real’ businesses and brands. Adding an address, a privacy policy and other basic housekeeping that reputable online operators would have on their website, can make all the difference with how well a website performs in the search engines. This Google blog post offers some guidance on building high quality websites and one of the rhetorical questions asked is “Would I trust this website with my credit card details?” If the answer is no then it would suggest there are some quality issues that need addressing

 

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