It’s no surprise that having contact with the internet is an important part of succeeding in the modern business world. Leveraging activity and content online help businesses big and small make an impact through relevance. By creating a great online experience, these companies are starting to tap into the growing internet and e-commerce markets. They are doing their best to relate to customers and express their ability to provide the perfect products for the perfect customers.
Although the online revolution is alive and well, there are so many businesses who just can’t seem to make it work. It really comes down to a botched approach to their websites. So, what are the most important factors of a website? Well, according to Google, the most important factors are performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. Let’s take a look at these 4 segments and how they affect your website’s ability to drive traffic.
Performance
Having a fast site is extremely important, and that’s why Google makes sure you take that into account when you are building. A fast and efficient site will load in roughly the same time across any network condition or connection speed. You can use tools like Google Page Speed Insights or GTmetrix to help you figure out if your site is fast. You want to stick to the Google guidelines for a fast site, but you can do that with all the audits given from GTmetrix. In terms of goals you should shoot for, it comes down to the individual page performance when you are judging the speed.
You want your pages to load in under 6 seconds, and you should try to get it to load in at least 2 seconds if you can. They say every second your page takes to load, you lose 10% of your conversion potential. That’s a lot of potential money lost for every second it takes. Each page should also be less than 1mb. This is to help mobile customers get faster service without destroying their data limits. On top of that, keeping your page size down to that limit helps your page load time is consistent times across all platforms. The final major part of the performance comes down to the number of requests a page makes when it’s loaded. You want to keep your requests under 80 if you can, and even less does better. Fewer requests can lead to faster load times since it takes fewer resources to create the page.
Accessibility and Best Practices
Accessibility is extremely important for your website. This category really looks at the mixture of UX and UI on the site, and how it compares to text and response standards. It looks at your site on different platforms. It will grade your sites on font contrast, usage, and the ability for disabled peoples to use your platform without being misled. The goal is to provide your visitors with a safe and secure experience on your website. These scores are extremely important, and a poor score could result in low search ratings from search engines.
SEO
SEO is important because it helps the search engine bots understand what they are looking at. The bots use your content to understand what you are talking about and how it can relate to people online. It basically uses word and topic triggers to categorize and understand your pages. Each page will have it’s own specific SEO value, so it’s easy to see how blogging helps SEO. As you start to build your content pool, you give the bots more links to jump to and read. They can understand relationships between internal and external links within your content, and they can catch combinations of words to get your posts into search pools. The more the bots can understand your pages, the more likely they are to want to rank those pages for results. On top of that, the images inside your blogs can hold SEO value if your alt texts are relevant to your topics.
Making Your Website Fast and Friendly is Key
Really it comes down to creating the most user-friendly experience you can. Make sure you everything you have on your site is easy to ready, easy to navigate, and fast. If you can make sure those three areas are taken care of, you can really get a good start making a website that can grow on its own. The next major step is to make sure that your SEO is in order, so the bots know what you are talking about. Remember, you never want to sacrifice the quality of content, so don’t jump into old strategies like keyword stuffing or pick strange keywords for your posts. The bots can read those, and they can relate the natural usage in a sentence, so your best bet is to keep it natural. If you keep it natural and use topic focused language, your SEO will be the icing on the performance website cake.