Quality is King! Know How It Affects SEO

Posted on Oct 27 2016 - 4:09pm by Editorial Staff

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Image Source – Pixabay

People who are building websites often know how important search engine optimization is. They also tend to know that good SEO means working to appease robots. What I’m referring to is the fact that search engines don’t have actual people scanning websites for inclusion in search results. Google, for example, use very complex algorithms that automate the entire process. What we can call robots are browsing the web constantly, scanning websites for suitability.

Knowing that actual people aren’t the ones scanning their website can lead to a few problems. A lot of website owners think that quality isn’t something the algorithms take into account. After all, how can you quantify quality? Algorithms don’t exactly have what you would call an aesthetic or cultural appreciation of anything.

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Image Source – Pixabay

Well, there are certainly times where an algorithm’s taste can be brought into question. After all, if they ranked search results based on actual quality content, then BuzzFeed wouldn’t appear in searches at all. But there are a lot of metrics for quality that can, in fact, be found through automation. And that’s why you need to make quality count on your website.

Let’s go through some of the ways these search engine robots can tell if your website is of a high “quality”.

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Image Source – Pixabay

Speed / technical performance

A slow website isn’t something anyone wants to spend time on. If your website is taking a few seconds to load basic content on a high-speed connection, then it’s way too slow. The search engine robots can, of course, detect when a website is slow. You will definitely be penalized in the rankings if your website falls into this category. Look into optimizing your images and other non-text content. You may also want to look for another web host or SEO consulting business which specializes in working towards letting you have a better website performance.

Link quality

All of the quality metrics that are applied to your website are also applied to the websites you link to. So if you’re linking to slow, unoriginal, unpopular websites? Then your ranking is going to take a hit. Google doesn’t want to link people to websites than then, in turn, link them to low-quality websites. The actual quality of your linking methods is also taken into account. Read up on the latest Google Penguin 4.0 update to get to better grips with linking.

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Image Source – Wikimedia

Engagement

Search engines also observe the behavior of a user that has accessed your website. This, in many ways, is the most important thing for them to consider. How much time is the average visitor spending on your website? How often do people hit ‘back’ to return to the search results page? This is vital information when it comes to assessing the quality of your website. Make sure your keywords are relevant and that you have plenty of content. This will help with engagement.

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Image Source – Pixabay

Originality

If you’re simply ripping off other people’s work, then search engines are going to figure it out. After all, they have an extremely large catalog of websites to work from! If your text and layout matches another source, then the plagiarism alarm bells will start ringing. Your rankings will definitely take a hit. Make sure you keep it fresh!

About the Author

Editorial Staff at I2Mag is a team of subject experts.