Building a top-notch website that appeals to visitors and search engines alike can be a challenge. Many people find it difficult to balance the careful art of appealing to real people while also managing the technical aspects that keep search engines happy. As entities such as Google and Bing become more intelligent with respect to basing rankings off of what people truly enjoy, the user experience continues to become more and more important. Whether your website is new, old or anywhere in between, then there is still room for improvement. We’ll discuss below five simple elements that every professional and high-quality website must possess in order to be viewed favourably by all.

Content Relevance

In order to appeal to readers, the content they receive after clicking on your website and its pages must match their interests. Content relevance, for this reason, is the most important element of any good website. Google in particular now knows how to analyze themes, topics and quality of words – in combination with user interaction/behaviour on your site – in order to determine the quality of your work. By delivering content as advertised and focusing on its quality, you will have accomplished the most basic requirement for a successful website.

Multimedia Inclusion

A website that merely contains basic text and a simple web design will never perform well in most search niches today. People expect content to be varied and multi-faceted, which means the inclusion of multimedia is key. If you are pinging to Google links to videos, photo galleries, podcasts, social media profiles and infographics, then you will discover that the Google Gods and users alike will be more likely to consider you a professional and authoritative source in your niche.

Proper Grammar

While it may seem like more of a formality than anything else, many people report that they are turned off by bad grammar or misspellings. People who are coming to your website expect to find what they need, but they also expect an authoritative brand to know how to convey a message properly. With spell-checks built into practically all browsers today, bad grammar and misspellings are inexcusable.

Ideal Formatting

Content can be perceived differently depending on the format in which it is served. Not only will users fault you for poor formatting, but Google can read web code to determine how the overall page layout looks. You want to be sure to use header tags to properly size titles and subtitles, use proper paragraphs in order to ensure content is not crammed together, and use multimedia to help break up the monotony of longer posts and articles.

Mobile Design

With the majority of Google’s search traffic now originating from mobile devices, it is absolutely necessary for professional websites to be pinging to Google a mobile responsive design. Users who come to your website and who cannot read it will leave, resulting in high bounce rates and lower rankings. In addition, Google is now actively assessing websites for mobile responsive design; those that fail the test are bound to be downgraded in search results.