Google’s advice on how to create a better website (Part 1)

Many of you may wonder about how you can improve your website in order to get the most from it. Every week we at Resource Techniques write informative and educational articles indicating in many different ways how you as a business can improve your website and web presence.

However, just listening to the professionals may not give you the confidence to make radical changes to your website but what if the information was right from the horse’s mouth?

Here are Google’s webmaster tutorial guidelines on how you can produce the best website for you and your customers, helping you to understand and improve your websites usability and SEO:

Step one - Identify your audience

Before you create or review your content you need to identify who will be your websites audience. Once you have identified your audience you can create relevant and useful content directed at them.

With your audience in mind you are ready to begin writing your content.

Step two – Create valuable content

Your website should be designed and built to create the best experience possible for your audience. The best type of content for your audience is original and high quality content.

Your aim is to provide your audience with useful and unique content that will encourage them to return to your site again and again. If the content is that good they may even be inclined to link to your content from their websites (which in turn would improve your SEO).

Here are Googles tips to create better content:

• Write useful and informative content: Your Estate Agency website should include such information as your office location, open hours, contact information, an about us section, testimonials and a blog about the latest news regarding your local area and your industry.

• Provide content with more value: When writing content ensure the articles provide more value or a different perspective than others from a similar topic. Give the user a reason to choose your website over another.

• Honest and truthful content: Only write content that is credible. Boost your credibility by listing reviews and testimonials on your website. An about us section will also help users trust you more.

• Only produce high quality content: Your content needs to be in your own words, informative, educational and high quality. It should not be copied from another website. It should be written to improve the usability of your website, not to rank well within the search engines.

• Ensure your content is appealing: Your audience will react better to content if you include images. Don’t go crazy with different fonts thinking it will make you look unique as it may distract and discourage users from the primary goal. Also go careful with spelling and grammatical errors, you only have one change to make a first impression.

What can deter visitors from your website?

• Errors – this could be broken images or links, or even incorrect information.
• Spelling or grammatical mistakes
• Too much – anything in excess can be overwhelming

Step 3 – Build the right structure

Your estate agent website needs to be easy to navigate. All users need to be able to quickly and easily find the content they are looking for within seconds of entering your website.

You also want the search engines to be able to easily crawl your website, indexing and understanding the content that you think is important.

Building a clear and logical navigation

Every website has a home page. This is the starting page for the majority of your users. This page will help direct your visitors to the information they are looking for.

Your primary navigation should state all the important pages on your website. Your primary navigation is likely to include these pages – Home > Property Search > About Us > Contact Us. The navigation bar is normally placed at the top of the webpage.

The structure of your website should also be logical. Your website should flow, guiding your visitors through until they complete their goal.

Step 4 – Test

Before making your content and website live, you should show your staff, family and friends, asking for them to give you feedback. Ask them what they think of your website as a potential customer.

You can also do surveys and usability tests to ensure your content is the best it can be.

Questions you should ask:

• What would potential customers expect to find on your website?
• Is there any information that could be useful to a visitor missing?
• Can specific criteria property listing be found easily?
• Is the call-to-action prominent enough?

This sort of feedback can help you relate to your audience on a better level allowing you to make improvements to increase the usability of your website.