Here is a visual look at the 9 important elements of a high quality website (extract appears below).

Your website is your main identity on the Internet.

High Quality Website

As you design (or redesign) your website, pay particular attention to the following items:

Extract from the Infographic:

  1. Quality Content
    1. Don’t scrimp when it comes to content. Quality content is one of the most important elements of your website or blog. So make sure your content is stellar!
    2. Good content is meaningful, relevant and useful for your users, educates them and invites sharing and leads to discussions.
    3. Search Engines can differentiate between content written for humans and search engines so make sure you write for users and not for search engines.
  2. Typos & Grammar
    1. Typos and poor grammar are known to turn off visitors to your website so check your writing thoroughly before publishing content.
    2. Use tools such as spell checkers and grammar checkers and make sure your content has no spelling errors or grammatical errors.
    3. Search Engines are smart enough to detect spelling and grammar mistakes and are known to penalize websites with such mistakes.
  3. Readability & Formatting
    1. Visitors to your website or blog will be turned away by poor readability or improperly formatted content so follow properly guidelines for both.
    2. Keep your material succinct and clear. Use short sentences to make your points. Use text formatting to highlight essential information and make your material easy to read.
    3. We tend to scan content rather than read so format your content properly. Use lists, bullet points, and white space to lay out your material so it is easy to scan and read.
  4. Visual Elements
    1. A picture is still worth a thousand words! And we say that if a picture is worth a thousand words then a video must be worth a hundred thousand words!
    2. Articles & web pages with images & other visual elements lead to higher engagement & social sharing.
    3. Websites with more visual elements rank higher – web pages with more than 5 images tend to get a rank boost.
  5. Ease of Navigation
    1. Make sure your website is easy to navigate. Use a simple but effective menu structure that is easy to use and work with.
    2. Website visitors should be able to find what they are looking for without having to hunt around or click multiple times.
    3. Websites that have overly complex menu structures or unclear internal linking will turn visitors away pretty quickly.
  6. Link Structure
    1. Pay special attention and make use of backlinks. In fact, 90% of the sites that rank in the top 3 positions use at least one internal self-referencing link.
    2. Maintain link relevance at all times. Search engines have become so sophisticated that they can detect non-relevant links and these can lead to penalties!
    3. Don’t be afraid of linking to relevant external content. In fact, such links are considered very valuable by your readers and help you build more engagement.
  7. Social Sharing
    1. Search Engines use social sharing as a ranking signal. A higher number of shares can lead to a higher placement on search results.
    2. Make sure your web pages, blog & articles have clearly visible social media icons that allow people to share your material at a click.
    3. Good quality content tends to be shared more, shared often and shared more frequently.
  8. Mobile Friendliness
    1. Mobile Internet users have overtaken desktop (or traditional) Internet users so you need to ensure that your website is 100% mobile device friendly.
    2. Users don’t like cut-off or shrunk down websites on a small screen where they have to zoom-in and zoom-out and scroll around excessively.
    3. In fact, in April 2015, Google announced that they will lower the rank of any websites that are not mobile device friendly.
  9. Loading Speed
    1. It used to be said that “patience is a virtue” but that no longer holds true! Today’s website visitors have little patience for slow performing websites as do search engines!
    2. Check your website using commonly available tools such as Google’s Pagespeed Insights, Yahoo’s Y!Slow, Pingdom and other tools to see how fast it loads.
    3. Optimize your website so it performs well. Fast loading websites can get a search rank boost and poorly performing websites can get dinged, especially by Google.

Sources
www.forbes.com
www.fastcompany.com
www.moz.com
www.searchengineland.com
www.youtube.com
www.arnimadesign.com
www.positionly.com
www.grammarly.com
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
www.pingdom.com
www.yslow.org
www.kissmetrics.com
http://blog.google.com