What Does a Great Website Look Like?
Not any website can rank on the internet. Major search engines like Google and Bing have a strong devotion to rank only the best websites. For example, billions of people around the world trust Google because the search engine provides the most accurate results for any query.
This ability helps Google hold its monopoly atop the world’s available search engines. To rank on Google and thrive on the search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s important to understand what search engines are looking for in a “great website”.
Particularly, what does a great website look like? The answer to this question can be found below.
A Great Website is Fast
The most obvious trait of a great website is its speed. Let’s face it – no one is going to wait all day for your website to load. There are millions of other websites where they can give their attention to.
The competitive nature of the internet necessitates optimal website speeds. But, how fast does a website have to be nowadays. Opinions differ on the matter, but it’s generally recommended that a website loads in less than two seconds.
Otherwise, your website could receive a penalty from Google. People usually only spend 15 seconds on a website before deciding to move forward or not. Optimizing your website’s speed can set a great first impression for potential customers and win favor from Google and Bing.
A Great Website is Responsive
Gone are the days where most people only used desktop computers and laptops to surf the internet. Most internet traffic comes from mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.
Search engines have now adapted, requiring websites to become mobile-friendly and responsive. The reason why is because websites appear differently on various platforms. Desktop computers and laptops have larger screen sizes, which means that an entire website can be seen easily.
Mobile devices have a smaller screen size, which means that the user has to be accommodated. Website versions must differ on both desktop and mobile platforms. Otherwise, you could receive yet another penalty from Google.
A Great Website is Optimized
Optimization is the in-depth process of fine-tuning a website to rank online. Search engines use robots, known as spiders, to crawl every website on the internet. These spiders check every feature of a website, assess its quality and relevance, and rank or index the website accordingly on the SERPs.
Not all websites can be read by these spiders. In fact, if you don’t optimize your website, it may not rank at all. A great website is always optimized to ensure it’s crawled, rendered, and indexed efficiently.
For example, amatuer website builders will randomly add images to their site. The problem is that these images are large files and don’t have any supporting text to indicate what they’re about.
Spiders don’t have eyes, so they rely on alternative text (words describing the image) to understand its context. Also, spiders have a hard time rendering large images anyway. Optimizing a website means making sure that every aspect is comprehended by spiders.
A Great Website is Beautiful
Consumers are naturally judgemental about the websites they visit. If your website looks like it’s stuck in the 90’s, they’re going to click away. Beautiful websites not only capture an audience’s attention, it also keeps them there.
The longer people stay on your website, its dwell time will increase. Dwell time is simply how long a person stays on your website. High dwell time improves search engine optimization (SEO) because it shows people are attracted to your website.
Since search engines have an obligation to rank the best, popular websites, yours will make the cut.
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Featured photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
