Today’s Internet is flooded with millions of websites where you can find almost any information, services, shops, companies, and the list goes on. Despite having this enormous amount of offer, not all of these sites have what is commonly considered as key elements to make them optimal.
A good website must have a few elements that guarantee a quality user experience and, ultimately, a good ranking position on Google’s result page. Let’s see what these key factors are.
01. The design of your website
The same way it happens with food, clothes, a house or a car, it happens as well with a website: we “buy” with our eyes, and if we like what we see, we keep looking. The minute we enter a site and we see an appealing design, a logical structure and the information available to us, we will most likely want to know more and keep browsing until we complete our visit.
If the site has unappealing colours or a poor design, our impression will be completely different. Appearance is key in a website, as it has the power to retain in a matter of seconds. If we scare our audience away right when they enter, a bad positioning in Google is almost guaranteed and, therefore, poor online visibility.
02. Technical aspects
So we already have an attractive design, capable of surprising our visitors. That’s great. But we mustn’t forget that a website is nothing but a digital and technological tool and, as such, it has a technical aspect to it.
But this shouldn’t intimidate us, it’s not rocket science, so with a few basic aspects, you’ll be sure to have your website’s health covered in case something happens. So what are these technical things that are so important for a good website? These are a few:
- Have security components that prevent attacks, hacks or spam.
- Do security backups. If something should happen and the data of our site is lost, it is key to have done a security copy so we can restore it and save us from losing all the work.
- Have all our web’s plugins and extras updated, it is also very important to keep it in good shape. Whether is a WordPress update, or your visual builder, or the version of our PHP. Update everything, all the time.
- Have an SSL certificate for your domain. This will guarantee safe navigation through the site whenever there is an exchange of data between our users and our site.
- Have a quality hosting service, which brings us to the next chapter.
03. Hosting for our website
Much like we would do with any belonging of ours, a website needs to be stored somewhere for it to be visible and active. That is why any site needs a hosting service, which means, a place to store it.
As this is one of the most important keys, it is safe to say that we need to find the best possible service out there, right? That is why it is so important to analyze and consider the features and characteristics these companies offer for this service. How do we analyze this? The service provider we choose should have:
- Loading speed. Those websites that take more than 3 seconds to load are abandoned by users. That is why we have to make sure that our site loads fast, otherwise, we will lose visitors and Google will value our site negatively and we will end up not having any visibility.
- Technical support. As I said earlier, in a technical environment a lot of unexpected issues can happen, that is why we need to solve them quickly. Having a technical support team that is able to assist you with any potential problem has tremendous value. It will be the difference between having a live and running website and having nothing.
- Security. In the beginning, I said that the Internet today is loaded with websites, which means it is equally full of hackers, attackers and bots. Daily, there are thousands of attempts of hackers trying to access sites, accounts, data, etc, which makes it crucial to have our site protected against these attackers.
- Server location. It is preferable that our site is located in the same area we want to operate our business. If our audience is Italy and our server is in Spain, that’s ok. But if our audience is in the US or Asia, that could complicate things.
There are a few market comparisons you can check to see what provider works best for you. Existen varias comparativas para poder decidir con seguridad cuál es el mejor servicio para nuestra web. In this ranking, you’ll see some of the most popular and best-reviewed ones.
04. SEO
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is an online ranking method that can help our site to be visible on the first results page of Google when our audience looks for a term o a phrase. This is a key aspect nowadays, as it is the most demanded service by brands and businesses all over the world who want to stand out over their competition.
In a previous post, I talked about what SEO is and it is for, and how relevant it is if we want our audience to click on our website and not another.
Aspects like content, the use of keywords that users type when they want to find us, or technical SEO issues (broken links, duplicate content, etc) will have to be very present in your search engine positioning strategy, in Google mostly.
05. Social Media
Everybody knows that social media is not only a way of connecting people, but a key tool to make ourselves visible, both individually and professionally. Therefore, it is important that, even if we have the perfect website, we mustn’t ignore our presence in these channels.
Having a curated profile in the social network that suits you best will give you the opportunity to gain extra visibility and redirect followers to your site. At the end of the day, we want a website so our users go there and complete some sort of action, right? Your social media profiles can help you do exactly that.
These profiles, however, require dedication and a high frequency in posts. These platforms, just like Google, want to have fresh and continuous content. Only then will users get more followers, interactions and visibility.
So don’t forget to have your website link to your social media profiles and vice-versa.
Now, you have 5 keys to make your website perfectly optimized and ready to receive visitors. In future posts, I will talk about more strategies and methods to keep you up to date and visible to your audience.
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