Quality website in 2022

Not every webmaster understands what a quality website is – publish an article on website quality assurance based on Google's guidelines for webmasters. Google knows better than anyone else how many websites are created every day. In fact, more than 500,000 websites are created every day. Search engines have to index and sort all those numbers according to their algorithms.

The primary purpose of search engines is to check the suitability of a site and determine whether or not it should appear on the results pages for keywords (search terms). If a site does not meet the quality guidelines, it is removed from the results.

The search engines Google, Yandex, Bing, Baidu and Yahoo have established guidelines for webmasters. Below is a step-by-step look at what you need to do to have a high-quality website in the eyes of the Google search engine. By following the recommendations, you can significantly improve the website's position in the eyes of the search engines and thus do the initial work of promoting the site.

1. Design your site for users

It is a guideline from Google: create pages for users, not for search engines. Anyone who has noticed that a website has lots of pop-ups and that the main text block is hidden under ads understands this recommendation.

The desire to enrich oneself with revenue from Google Adsense or teaser networks crosses all boundaries. The webmaster no longer thinks about how to reduce the bounce rate, he is consumed by click analysis and pays no attention to the quality of the site.

Another situation: the webmaster manipulates the site's ranking by publishing SEO texts on the site that make little sense. The texts themselves are not interesting, there is no style, and keywords are listed separated by commas. This method is considered spam and keyword stuffing by the search engine, which Google fights. Again, the webmaster does not care about the quality of the site, does not think about its users, and focuses on the number of visitors.

2. Do not mislead users

This quality assurance recommendation is as important as the previous one. You have often noticed that a search such as "What is a quality website?" takes you to a page that is not about it at all. It is not hard to guess that such a user is dissatisfied with the site visit and leaves it.

There are many ways to trick users and they all boil down to misleading user expectations. The search engine considers such actions a violation of quality assurance rules.

3. Avoid tricks to improve ratings

Webmasters have been trying to manipulate search engine rankings since the advent of Google. Every webmaster wants his website to be number one for all keywords and to garner all traffic and the more the better. Google employs the best engineers, analysts and technicians in the world. Can a webmaster really think of a way to cheat a search engine? This is a rhetorical question.

Every webmaster should ask: will it be useful to users? If so, the number of quality sites will increase significantly.

4. Uniqueness of the site

Last but not least, make your website unique so that users return to it again and again. Make your site stand out from the competition. On this point, Google even recommends webmasters to develop a website and analyse its competitors beforehand.

This way, Google allows users to visit sites with different design and content. In theory, a webmaster could create 10 clones of his site, but this approach does not guarantee that the site is unique.

Also consider things like site conversion and usability (ease of navigation), ease of display on mobile devices, and the technical state of the resource (speed of page loading, validation of html formatting). Compliance with technical conditions is fixable and doable. Not every webmaster is a high-level technician, so their priority is to follow simple Google recommendations for webmasters.

Summary: Make sites for people, for your favourite users, and the search engine rankings will come back naturally!

This guide was compiled by Google for internal use, but in 2013 the company decided to share it with webmasters for 2 reasons:

• to improve the quality of websites in general;
• to enable webmasters to differentiate their sites from the competition

Google's short guide to search engine recommendations gives the top 3 tips. Let's look at each recommendation in the guide individually.

Highlight your site in search results

You've already noticed that no 2 identical snippets appear in search results. If you follow the guidelines for uniqueness and highlighting your site in search results, there is zero chance of two identical descriptions appearing. First, let's understand what a snippet is and why it is so important for the search engine.

A snippet is an extract or example of the descriptive part of the site. It is meant to provide a brief overview of the content before you navigate to the website itself.

An example of a snippet for the search query "Website Search Engine Optimisation Guide":

Each snippet consists of 3 main parts:

• main article (meta title)
• url (address where the page can be reached)
• description (meta description)

With the phrase "highlight your site in search results", Google recommends highlighting your snippet. This means an interesting and clickable page title (meta title), a thematic url and a meaningful description of the page (meta description).

Why is this important?

On the one hand, most modern CMS allows you to freely manage all 3 snippet components. On the other hand, not every webmaster wants to do this during the development phase of a website. Very often, the created and styled pages of a test project are transferred to a live site. After indexing, masterwork snippets appear in search results.

An example of how not to do it:

• Title: "Home Page"
• url: ?id=2
• Blank or double header

It is very important to understand one simple thing when creating meta tags: the user must want to go to your site. The snippet must be about this. Few people will like it if you show other content on your site that is not related to promotion.

Image recognition

Google pays a lot of attention to ../images on websites. According to the search engine's guidelines, ../images on a page give a positive user experience. Therefore, the search engine has rules for image placement:

1. clear and short image titles
2. a meaningful alt attribute
3. description below the image

Implementing these rules is very easy via the CMS, so we won't dwell on that. The only recommendation is that webmasters should not get carried away by excessive alt description or overspamming (misuse of keywords). For more information, read the article on Google keywords.

Adding new content

Google recommends looking at the website through your customer's eyes and seeing it as a shop window. If the showcase is not updated for six months, it becomes less interesting to customers.

This is because the search engine goes to your website daily and scans it. In doing so, Google compares the current content of your website with the previous time. If your website is not updated, it gets much less attention from the search engine.

You have to admit that it takes a lot of time to think of and write an interesting article, then put it on the website, write nice meta tags and alt for pictures. Wouldn't it be easier to do nothing? Google appreciates the work of the webmaster, so it is definitely worth it.

So much for this short guide on search engine optimisation of websites. As you can see, the 3 recommendations are easy to follow.