Criteria For A Site Of Quality

These criteria are not all taken into account by search engines, but they design nevertheless a site of quality for visitors, which is essential.



Domain name

 Having a true domain name and not a sub-directory on a shared hosting. The semantics of the name must be in connection with the contents of the site.

Contents

 Contents must be complete, coherent, in good English and original. It will so attract backlinks on the site and thus improve the score for search engines.

Links

 No broken links, do not link to pages without interest and not links towards pages whose contents are not in close connection with your page. Check for broken links from time to time.
The title attribute of the <a> tag makes it possible to display a message when the mouse stay on the link but it is also essential for search engines. In the same way the alt attribute provides information on images.

Navigation

 All pages in the site must be reached, directly or not, from the home page. Ideally the home page has at least a link to each topic in the site. It may be assisted by a site map.

Visitors

 1) Must often return to the site: they will make it because they will find there useful references, unique contents, an attractive presentation.
2) Must remain a long time on the site: the pages are linked between them, the contents is interesting. One can use the techniques of the novelist, arouse interest, or even create a suspense.

Clicks in results

 In the results of the search engines, one must click on your page. For that one needs a title and a description which encourage to choose this page rather than one of the others, even and especially if they are placed before your link.
The title is taken by engines either in the <title> tag in the <head> section of the HTML code of the page, or in an <h1> tag in the body of the page.
The description is taken by search engine at the beginning of the page, or by concatenation of sentences, or in the <meta name="description" content=""> tag of the <head> section.

Dmoz

 It is necessary to be listed in the Open Directory directory (Dmoz.org), which is also that of Google and many other search engines. But not before the site is built and is filled with consistent contents. One will be able to then submit the site in several categories if it comprises folders about different themes.

Bookmark

 The fact of being in bookmark allows to keep readers and can be taken into account by search engines.
For that purpose, the rules are the same ones as those which are given higher (visitors).

Style sheets

 The use of CSS makes the difference between sites of quality and sites from newbies.

Favicon

 It is the image which is displayed in the bar of URL on the left of the name of your site. See the article about how to create the favicon of your site. It can be added in 5 minutes.

(c) 2007 Denis Sureau. Scriptol.com