Yesterday, we outlined three very important elements that search engines use to determine whether or not your website is considered to be a “high-quality” institution. Maintaining a good reputation across all entities that mention your website or brand, ensuring that the infrastructure, links and navigation are error-free, and providing excellent content may very well be the three most important elements to consider when wanting to please Bing, Google and other search engines. However, there are several more elements to consider. We’ll provide three more metrics today that affect how search engines will view the quality of your website, helping you to respond to these challenges in a proactive fashion.

Sensible Page Design

It is exceedingly rare that you will run into a website on the first page of any set of search results that is not designed to be a well-functioning website. Websites that maintain user designs stuck in the previous century or that maintain hard-to-use navigational components will certainly not be found in the top positions of search results very often. Why is this? Because search engines users who are pinging servers expect to find quality websites that are easy to navigate. If they land on your site but cannot easily find information or use its functions, then they are sure to leave very shortly after arriving. These statistics are monitored by search engines and used to determine if a website should rank well in a given set of search results. Always be sure to deliver an effective and easy to use page design in order to be seen as high-quality.

Ample Page Information

In order to do well in search, your website or blog should have as much information available on it as possible. What does this mean? Not only should you be pinging servers with plenty of content and detailed information in regards to the niche you’re targeting, but you should also be descriptive with respect to the brand’s information. For instance, contact information helps search engines further determine how you relate to the overall niche and gives a sense of trustworthiness that is crucial in order to rank well. Company address, hours of operation, a phone number and other personal information is also great to have and will further allow for competition in select localized search results. Many brands today – even those based entirely online – have found great success in targeting local search results, but contact and page information is essential to this endeavour.

Supplemental Assistance

Last but not least, users who are helped through the inclusion of added information, tools and resources will be more likely to send the right signals back to search engines that tell them your site is of the highest quality. For instance, resources that help recommend other, off-site products to users based on their selections from your own website can be a great form of supplemental assistance. Providing various calculators or other web-based programs that help users find more information and resources will increase the amount of time and engagement that users spend on your site and will also help connect the site with other services, which sends positive indicators to search engines about your brand.