Edwin Toonen
Edwin is a specialist in strategic content. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skills at the leading web design magazine in the Netherlands.
People often ask us to explain what makes a good website. Whether we have a list of items a great site should have. There is no simple, single answer to this. As in many areas of search engine optimization, the answer is: It depends. What kind of website do you have, who do you want to target? What do you want to achieve? Regardless, in this post, I’m going to list 7 elements that can help make any site a good site and a better search result.
Holistic SEO
The most important thing is that we at Yoast advocate holistic SEO. Holistic search engine optimization essentially helps you get the best result. This means that every part of your website will be optimized at every level from satisfying user intent to delivering a great user experience. If you combine all of these things into one solid SEO strategy, implement the improvements, and keep an eye on the results, then you are on the right track!
7 elements of a good website
Many of the things that we think are important for a good website are difficult to quantify. In search engine optimization, for example, there is a lot of talk about quality. Even Google has said for years that you should focus on the quality of your website and content. After every algorithmic update from Google, the answer is the same for those who have lost rankings: it may not be your fault as other websites seem better suited to that particular query. However, you should work on the overall quality of your query content.
People flock to the Search Qualifier Guidelines for information about it and look for guidance. You shouldn’t consider everything Google says gospel, but in this case you are correct. You should improve your content – always! Always be mindful of user intent and the behavior of your prospects. You should repeat your keyword research regularly. And check your niche, what’s going on in your part of the market? By continuously evaluating your SEO strategy, you can get a grip on the changing market and find new opportunities.
1. Your website fulfills the user’s intent and has a clear purpose
Do you know your audience Do you know your business and what do you contribute to this world? Why would someone come to your website and do business with you? It’s not because you think you have a great product – it just doesn’t fly anymore. “Build it and they will come?” Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. You need to have a mission and a goal for your website.
If you want to be successful, you need to know your audience. You have to uncover everything about them. You can probably figure out what to say that they want, but is that the same as what you really need? Is your product or service just offering a possible solution to a problem or is it really making your customers’ lives better? Are you selling a drill or a hole in the wall?
Your story has to be right. It has to be aligned with the wishes and needs of the people. It means that you should set the search intent for your website. Explore the different ways people can get to your pages and customize them to answer their questions. Plan the user journey from A to Z and place your content in strategic places. Also, keep track of the way you phrase your answers. Most of the time, a conversation style will turn out to be exactly what you’re looking for.
2. Your website has technical skills
A good website is easy to crawl and shows search engines what they can and cannot index. Good websites don’t have big bugs. A good website loads super fast from anywhere in the world. Make sure you do whatever you can to load these pages asap.
Technical SEO is incredibly important, but you can stay ahead of the curve by getting the basics right. Think carefully about which CMS you choose and how you want to run it. Choose a reputable hosting company – one that is flexible and helpful. We may be a bit biased, but WordPress gave us everything we need. It’s solid, flexible, and has a huge following. WordPress is pretty SEO friendly, but with a bit of help from Yoast SEO, you can get your WordPress SEO up and running in no time.
3. Your website is trustworthy, safe, and secure
Both search engines and users are looking for signals that mean trust. Why should your website or content be trusted? Regular downtime can indicate sloppy maintenance. A missing green lock icon may mean you are not taking security seriously. There are plenty of little clues to look for.
Search engines like Google want to give searchers the best possible result. Increasingly, when a search engine doubts your claims, or when you use sketchy “experts” to validate your content, it doesn’t show up. You will choose a result that has been shown to be a good result. Therefore, you have to work on your trustworthiness at all levels, both on a technical level and on a content level.
In addition, your website should be a safe haven for visitors. You must have your security in order. A hacked site won’t get you anywhere! And a hacked site is easier to prevent than repair. Use the latest software, keep your SSL in order, create strong passwords, use tools like Cloudflare to protect your site from DDoS attacks, etc.
4. Your website has a great design and user interface
Does your website have to be beautiful? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The design of your website must help achieve the goals you have set. Your message should be loud and clear. The design should be branded and well thought out. More importantly, however, your website should be clear and easy to use for everyone. Accessibility is not something to look out for.
The user experience is not just how something looks but also how it feels. It’s about giving users a joyful experience that they will remember. UX also doesn’t keep users waiting long for your pages to load, which frustrates them because they can’t read the text on your website thanks to your color scheme or they can’t press the buttons on your mobile website. Think to yourself: How can I turn frustration into happiness?
And happy users may just have higher buyer intent, so get those CTAs in order!
5. Your website has fantastic, user-centric content
Be user-centric, not company-centric. Good content helps your users achieve their goals, and you want to deliver that content at the right time while keeping a firm eye on business goals. To do this, you need to know your user exactly as I mentioned earlier. Understand them, understand their behavior, and focus your content on them. The content you offer should be clear and easy to understand using the same language that the user knows well. Try to bring something unique to the table. Do your research and present the original coverage.
6. Your website is mobile-friendly (or rather mobile-first).
Mobile traffic has continued to grow in recent years. If your website is currently not mobile-friendly, then you should head over to it and work on your mobile SEO. However, if your site has been mobile-friendly for a while, now is the time to start building your next mobile site first.
It’s not a new concept or anything, but most websites are still developed on the desktop first. After the desktop view has been designed, the designer resizes it to the size of the mobile device, often losing its authenticity and freshness. When you adopt a mobile-first mindset, you can focus on the tasks users should be doing on your mobile website. It helps clear the clutter and often lets you come up with a minimal and fully focused design. Less is more, do you remember?
7. Your website can “speak” directly to search engines
For years, search engines have tried to read content on pages to determine what that page is about. You need this content in order to match the search query with the indexed pages that provide the best answers to that query. It turns out that really understanding what something is or means on a page is more difficult than it seems, especially for machines. Search engines need a little guide to determine the true meaning of elements on a page. Enter structured data in schema format.
Schema is like a translator for search engines. It describes elements on a page so search engines can now safely say that a review is a review and a recipe is a recipe. Because Google is so sure about the content, marking these items can produce large results on the search results pages. This includes carousels, nutrition facts for recipes, star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, wipeable how-to boxes for cell phones and much more. Structured data is one of the areas where search engines consume a lot of resources these days. So take care.
We noticed this and created a complete and fully extensible schema framework in Yoast SEO. This structured data implementation creates a complete diagram for your website so that search engines not only know what it all means, but how it all relates to the bigger picture.
What makes a good website?
There is a lot to be done to build a good website. It’s not just about buying a domain, getting a random host, installing WordPress, and choosing a theme that looks cool. That prepares you for failure. You have to plan to get things right. You need a strategy – maybe that’s the most important element of a good website.
These are some of the most important elements to focus on when developing or improving your website. This is not an exhaustive list so I want to ask you: what is your main focus in building a good website?
Read more: 4 tips to quickly improve your website in the current situation »
