What Makes a Good Web Page

What are the essential characteristics of a great web page?
What makes you want to stay on the page or navigate to other pages?
What would make you want to return?

A good web page should appeal to your visitors as well as the search engines. I mentioned visitors first because they are the most important component for establishing relationships, generating sales and/or obtaining subscribers.

Optimizing your web page for the search engines attracts lots of free traffic. Most people will arrive at your site through searching for a specific keyword or keyword phrase.

What are the essential characteristics of a great web page?

Design

Create a beautiful design

First impressions make a big difference. If your site looks old or unprofessional a visitor will quickly leave and check out your competitors who may have a more professional design. For example, I am more attracted to a new shopping center with sharp looking stores than one with old stores with faded signs.

Make sure your web design includes lots of white space between elements, a clear, easy to use navigation and colors that harmonize well together. Use a consistent design across all pages so visitors don’t become confused where they are on your website.

Optimize your web page

If you want to generate free traffic from the search engines you need to optimize all your web pages. This means including your most important keywords in the meta title tag, and writing an attractive one sentence summary of your content for the meta description tag. The keywords placed in your meta tags should also be included in your web copy.

Other locations to include your keywords are in the header tags (h1, h2, h3), image descriptions, file names and navigation. Don’t try to trick the search engines by stuffing as many keywords as possible into your web pages. This may get your site penalized and result in lowered rankings.

Create a fast loading web page

Your website should load within a few seconds otherwise your visitor will leave immediately and probably never return.

To achieve fast loading pages:

• Reduce the size and quantity of the total images on one page. Only use images if it enhances the content. The same applies to the use of flash.
• Don’t use too many tables. Instead use cascading style sheets (CSS) to control the design of your web pages. Place the CSS in an external file instead of embedding all the code on the page. Do the same for javascript.
• Create clean html. HTML errors often cause web pages to display incorrectly across major browsers. This drives visitors away. Check for html errors by running your web page through an html validator.

Content

Offer valuable content

Some websites contain content that is timeless e.g. home page, about us or how-to articles however if you want to continually attract new visitors new content should be added on a regular basis. This keeps visitors coming back to receive more information. The information should not just be regurgitated from other sites but offer something unique using a friendly, conversational tone.

Share your content with others

Make it easy to share your content with others by offering an RSS feed, Newsletter subscription and/or free reports. Add social media icons to the end of your content and include videos within your content to attract visitors who prefer to watch and listen rather than read your content. Interacting with your visitors helps build long term relationships.

Web Hosting

Make sure you use a fast server to host your website so web pages load quickly. Beware of hosting companies that offer unlimited space and bandwidth. They are trying to maximize the number of sites they can put on one server. If your site suddenly requires more space or bandwidth it may overload the server which may result in your site becoming unavailable to your visitors. Choose a reliable web hosting company.

Website marketing

Your website will not be found if you don’t market it. Even if you do all the things mentioned above it will not appear in the search engines. Website promotion must be carried out regularly and consistently to generate a continuous stream of traffic. Once you’ve built a consistent amount of traffic continue to offer unique, valuable content so visitors keep coming back for more.

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