Webfusion

You’ve probably heard it before, but site quality is the way to make your site popular, drive traffic and convert to sales.

But what makes a quality site?

Well it does need good SEO – getting a higher rank on search engine results pages, will always help you make your site more popular and usually with relevant traffic, but that doesn’t make it a quality site.

Content is king, but in the modern world, being honest, king’s are little more than figureheads and just a part of the overall package. Of course your content needs to be well written, etc but good content is not necessarily the only or even main factor required to make a quality site.

In fact, even an authoritative voice behind your content, offering pages and pages of relevant content, fully optimized for SEO will not mean your site is the best of the best. It will be a site of some quality but not the top quality.

The real key behind a quality site and the ultimate rank for site quality is the customer experience. Usability used to be a big buzzword in the web design world and with tweaks and changes to the Google algorithm it is once again becoming the most important part of your site design.

That’s not to say it is just a robot-pleaser. Obviously a site that is easy to navigate, easy to use, and easy to share, will become more popular too. visitors are much more likely to return to a site they enjoyed using rather than one, where they were frustrated by the need to over-click or needed more mouse moving than a playful cat.

Google includes the time spent on your site by visitors as one of its ranking ratings. So making sure visitors enjoy their visit is also likely to ensure they extend their stay.

Site load time is also a factor for Google and for your visitors. The modern internet user is less patient than ever and if it is taking too long will click away, further affecting your Google rank.

The Google factor and search engine pleasing factors are important but remember they all flow from and as a result of a good customer experience. So as you redesign keep thinking customer, keep testing and also get it tested by less techie people than you. Make that work and your site will become more popular, more successful and more profitable.