What Makes A Good Website (Website Strategies)?

A good website is the foundation of a successful online presence. To create a high-traffic website that appears at the top of search results, you must understand What Makes A Good Website (Website Strategies). 

From SEO to user experience, this article will bring expert tips to help you create attractive and engaging websites. Whether you’re building a new site from scratch or looking to optimize an existing one, you will know how to succeed online.

What Is A Good Website?

A good website meets the needs of its users while offering a good user experience. A quality website should be easy to navigate, visually appealing, and bring valuable content. 

You must also optimize your website or have a website optimization service to improve its ranking and attract more visitors. Moreover, a good website should be accessible on various devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

One example of a good website is Airbnb. This site has a clean, user-friendly design, easy navigation, and high-quality images showcasing its listings. It also features customer reviews, maps, and filters to help users quickly find and book their ideal accommodations.  

Airbnb designed its website with mobile-responsive and used calls to action to encourage users to book their stay.

7 Factors of An Effective Website

In today’s world, having a website is critical for any business. It needs a deep understanding of the factors that make a perfect website, including:

• Visual Appeal and Functionality: Ensure your website is visually appealing and polished. Make it professional with quality photos and graphics. Regularly test for speed and functionality issues to prevent visitor frustration.
• Easy Navigation: Create clear and logical navigation with a hierarchical structure. It helps visitors achieve their goals quickly with on-site search and minimize dead-ends.
• Mobile Optimization: Ensure your site works seamlessly on any platform. This factor will enhance the visitor experience and SEO rankings.
• Fresh, Quality Content: Use language that resonates with your audience. High-quality content will keep visitors engaged and improve your SEO strategy.
• Easy-to-Access Contact Form: With multiple contact points, visitors can find this info easily on your website.
• Clear Calls to Action: Place a clear CTA, such as “ask me”, “chat with me”, or “contact us”, etc., on each page to encourage visitors to interact with your site. 
• Optimization for Search and Social Media: This technique makes sharing your content on social media easy for visitors. Optimization is how to increase website traffic and improve search ranking.

By focusing on the key factors above, you can create engaging, informative, and effective website to achieve your goals.

12 Tips To Quickly Improve Your Site

Nowadays, with various website creation tools available, building a website is easier than ever. However, it would help if you had more than simply a website. To optimize your website with all the factors above, you must follow certain design principles to have impressive website metrics and attract more visitors:

Use White Space

Website owners sometimes try to use more advertising or content by filling the white space. Meanwhile, white space is a fundamental aspect of good design. It helps to make content more readable. Users will be able to focus on the vital elements around the text.

According to Crazy Egg, white space around text and titles can increase user attention by 20%. Additionally, white space can create an open, modern, and fresh feel to your website. Those features help communicate your branding. 

However, it is crucial to note that white space can also take up valuable space, especially if you are trying to showcase a lot of content above the fold. The key is to balance white space with vital information and images. It ensures that your website is both visually appealing and informative.

Utilize Bullet Points

Using bullet points can be a quick and easy way for users to access essential info about your product or service. With them, you can present your site’s benefits, problem-solving methods, and crucial features in an attractive format. 

Furthermore, you don’t have to stick to traditional bullet points. By using creative icons, you can further enhance your message and help readers better understand your point. You can also place images as bullet points to focus on the most crucial aspects of your content without getting bogged down in details or jargon. 

One.org is an excellent example of this approach. It uses icons as bullet points to highlight their works clearly and concisely. In addition, using white space around the bullet points helps draw attention to each section and improve readability.

Use Good Headings

To attract the right audience, align your site’s headings and content with what potential customers are searching for. Placing relevant keywords in your headings also helps in targeting your message effectively.

Search engines give more weight to headings than other content. As a result, it is essential to select the proper title that is visible and stands out. Headers improve your site’s searchability and guide your users to scan your site and find what they need quickly.

An example of good headings with consistent content is on ROI Digitally’s website. They prominently display the headers with contrasting colors and accurately describe the following content. All those factors make navigating and finding relevant information easy for users. 

Keep Your Website Pages Consistent

Consistency is vital when it comes to web design. Everything from heading sizes and font choices to coloring, button styles, spacing, design elements, illustration styles, and photo choices should be cohesive. That’s how you create a seamless and polished look across all pages.

Consistent design is crucial in bringing users a positive and fun browsing experience. Sudden changes in structure between pages can cause confusion and frustration. Then you might face a loss of trust in your website.

The inconsistent design raises questions like “Am I in the right place?”. It can negatively impact the perception of the quality of your products and services. By keeping a consistent design, you can create a sense of trust and reliability with your audience.

Modernize Your Site

Modernizing your website is crucial regarding what makes a good website (website strategies). A website that is several years old may not be appealing to visitors. This issue can negatively impact your business. 

Feel free to invest in fresh and current content. That’s how you show visitors you are up-to-date and innovative. To modernize your website, replace outdated photos with new images. You can also upload videos such as welcome messages, product demos, and tutorials. 

Investing in epic blog posts showing your industry expertise is worth it. Those posts can attract visitors and make your business appear as a go-to expert. Lastly, today’s users prefer scrolling web pages instead of navigating through various pages. To have more visitors, you need to integrate your site’s content, color, and font seamlessly and make it easy to navigate. 

Time.com experienced a 15% drop in bounce rates when they switched to infinite scrolling. By paying attention to these details, visitors can easily explore your website. It will improve your site’s user experience and search engine rankings.

Optimize Your Page Speed

Slow page loading time is one of the most frustrating experiences for web users. This issue happens quickly with the increasing use of mobile devices and various platforms to access the content. Users expect fast results and will leave a site when it loads too long.

A delay of just five seconds in page loading time can increase your website’s “bounce rate” by over 20%, according to Section.io. This interrupting issue can cause frustration and even a loss of trust in your site.

To address this problem, assess your page speed using Google’s free service – Google PageSpeed. Following their suggestions for improving load time on both desktop and mobile devices will also help. One simple step is to compress the images before uploading them to your website. Remember that large image file sizes commonly cause slow loading times. 

A great example of a fast-loading website is Barnes and Noble. They take extra caution to load critical elements first. This process gives users trust that the content is on its way. By improving page speed, you can decrease your website’s bounce rate and improve your visitors’ user experience.

Use Images Wisely

When visitors land on a website, they quickly assess its credibility before exploring it further. One common mistake many site owners make is using generic stock photos that users have seen on multiple other sites. This approach can make your site look untrustworthy and generic. 

A case study by Spectrum, Inc. found that simply replacing a stock photo with a picture of a moving company’s virtual team of movers increased conversions. Similarly, using an actual image of their moving truck instead of a stock photo led to the same increase in conversions and instilled more trust in the page.

The bottom line is that stock photography cannot connect users with your brand, services, and products in a meaningful way. Only your actual images can accurately convey the essence of your business and engage users. Use photos to support your content and give visual breaks for users. Meanwhile, you must ensure they are relevant and unique to your brand.

Take Your Analytic Tools Out For A Spin

Analyzing your site’s traffic is crucial to making informed decisions about improving it. With back-office analytics tools and proprietary tools provided by web hosting partners, you will quickly know what’s going on with your site’s traffic. 

Google Analytics brings valuable insights into your website’s visitors. With this tool, you can get their demographics, browsing behavior, and length of stay. By knowing these insights, you can turn data into actionable info. After that, use them to enhance user experience, boost engagement, and improve click-through rates.

Investing a few hours into exploring the wealth of data available through analytics tools is crucial to optimize your website. With the information gathered, you can decide which areas of your website need changes and which are working well. 

Many analytics tools are available, so choose the ones that align with your site’s goals and target audience. You can better understand and improve your website’s performance by taking your analytic tools out for a spin.

Create a Clear Call To Action

Creating a clear Call To Action (CTA) is crucial to guide website visitors to take the desired action. Your content must be compelling, as a well-written CTA can make a huge difference in converting readers into customers. 

According to studies, e-mails with a strong CTA receive 371% more clicks than those that don’t have one. Craft your story in a way that pushes readers to take specific actions. 

Buttons should clearly state what’s in it for the reader and why they should take the next step now. Make your CTA personal and benefit-rich to gain high-quality leads and make visitors want to buy your products.

Regularly testing your CTAs is vital to see what works best. You can try various button colors, sizes, and placements to increase conversion rates. Using analytics tools such as Google Analytics can help you track the performance of your CTAs and fine-tune them over time.

Master SEO

To improve your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), you must learn how to optimize a website for SEO. It involves using relevant keywords, crafting tags and headlines, and utilizing linking strategies to your advantage.

To get started, check out resources like MOZ’s SEO strategy guide. It can help you plan to move up the search rank ladder. Moreover, many WordPress plugins can simplify optimizing your website for SEO. These plugins can help you find relevant long-tail keywords, add video thumbnails on search result pages, and more.

Reconsider Your Content Management System

Many businesses still use outdated, transaction-oriented Content Management System (CMS) technology. This issue may not offer the best experience for end-users or administrators. Instead, consider changing to a scenario-driven approach that pushes the daily technology deployment and improves user experience.

If you are unsatisfied with your current CMS and want to improve, it’s time to reconsider your options. You can choose to work with a Website Management Services provider. These services can help you assess your website’s current state. 

Motivate Mobility

To increase website traffic, ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Last year, Google added a mobile-focused label to search results to enhance user experience. Your website should use something other than non-mobile-friendly software like Flash to meet the mobile-friendly criteria. 

Make sure you use legible fonts that don’t require zooming. You should also reduce the need to zoom or scroll horizontally and position links with enough space for easy tapping.

To ensure that your site meets the mobile-friendly criteria and improves your website traffic, you can test pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Try reading the Webmasters Mobile Guide and finding major mobility issues on every page with the Mobile usability report. 

4 Practical Solutions for Duplicate Content

Talking about what makes a good website (or website strategies), another factor we should consider is content duplication. It is a common issue among many site owners and digital marketers. 

Duplicate content may negatively impact your website’s search engine rankings, causing a drop in traffic and engagement. To maintain a perfect website, please follow the practical solutions for content duplication below:

• Use canonical tags: These tags inform search engines which page version is the original or primary source. By using canonical tags, you can prevent search engines from indexing duplicate content. This method ensures that your site’s ranking depends on the original content. 
• Use 301 redirects: This technique redirects users and search engines to the original page. It reduces the possibility of duplicate content. The 301 redirects are especially helpful when you have multiple page versions. 
• Audit your website regularly: Auditing for duplicate content can also help maintain a good website. It involves using tools like Copyscape or Siteliner to find duplicate content and taking needed actions to remove or redirect it. 
• Create unique, high-quality content: You should upload original content that brings value to your audience. By doing that, you can increase the chances of your website being seen as the source of information. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What features should a good website have?

A good website should have an SEO-friendly structure, easy-to-understand navigation, responsive design, fast loading time, and a clear call-to-action. You should also regularly update high-quality, relevant content, engaging visuals, and multimedia elements. A user-friendly interface with easy-to-find contact info and social media links can improve the user experience.

What is a bad website?

A bad website has a poor design. It is hard to navigate, slow to load and needs more helpful information. A bad website may also have broken links and outdated content. Such a website is not optimized for search engines, making it harder to find and attracting fewer visitors.

What is the best way to build a good website?

The best way to build a good website is to understand your target audience and business objectives clearly. Create a robust and user-friendly design that is easy to navigate. Then you should optimize their website for search engines. Ensure that you bring high-quality content that speaks directly to your customers. Regularly update and maintain the site to keep it remains relevant and up-to-date.

Conclusion

You should consider many factors when determining what makes a good website (website strategies). From the look and feel of your website to how user-friendly it is, each element has an impact on visitors’ experiences.

Above is everything we want to share to help you understand what makes a good website. Those tips will help you to create the most effective website possible. Follow us for more valuable information and guidelines!