What Makes a Good Website?

There’s no secret trick to a web page that will bring customers back again and again, but there are certain steps you can take to greatly improve your site. One of the key things to consider is making the site as user-friendly and accessible as possible. Your site should have a simple, easy to use navigation interface, as well as pages that load quickly and tell your visitors what they need to know up front. It should be full of great content, regularly updated, intuitive and, through a combination of these factors, provide you with a decent visitor-customer conversion rate.

If your website is for a business, you should strive to make it appeal to your ideal customer. Visitors to your website are primarily hunters, looking for select information, and if they can’t find it on your site in a matter of seconds, they’re likely to take their business elsewhere. By imagining what it’s like to be the customer you’re targeting, and dealing with every query they could possibly have about your products or services, you’ll be able to build up an important trust between you and your customer base. This can be much more effective in gaining and retaining customers than hard-sale strategies used by a lot of other sites.

Another important factor to consider when setting up a website is good copywriting. High-quality content is more important on the web than a lot of people think, and sites with gleaming records for repeat visitors and customers owe much of this to great copy. You wouldn’t trust a site teeming with spelling mistakes and mundane copy, and neither will your customers. A good choice when recruiting a copywriter to your business, or outsourcing work to freelancers, will go much further than you’d expect. Just make sure whoever you hire has a decent background and a solid understanding of your business goals, and they’ll create the content required to meet those goals and hook in potential customers.

You could have the most well-designed website in the world, but that isn’t worth anything if it isn’t seen by anyone. Implementing search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of meticulously crafting every part of your site so that it appears higher in the search results for certain keywords. While several huge companies exist simply to provide SEO, there are a few simple but effective tactics you can utilize yourself to improve your site’s search engine ranking. One such tactic is researching keywords you want to rank highly in results for, then incorporating them frequently in the copy of your website. Don’t oversaturate your pages though; look instead for the perfect balance of frequent terms and professional, engaging copy. Google Adwords’ keyword tool is a simple and effective way of doing this. Links are also very important in terms of search engine optimisation. Do whatever you can to get links to your website in good content on high-ranking websites. Backlinks, as they are known, when accompanied by natural-reading copy, tells a search engine your site can be trusted, and pushes it higher in search rankings.

What do you think makes a good website? Please leave your comments below…