7 Important Factors to Improve Your Website – Part 2

Today in Part 2, we look at the remaining 4 factors which affect your website and its performance. Part 1 looked at the first 3 factors to improve your website.

The Entire Website

1. Broken links – It is important to check your website for broken links. This can happen with missing pages, images, media files or mistyped addresses in pages.
2. Orphan links – These happens when a page exists on the site, but none of your other pages link to it. If it is an important page, it has to be linked from other pages.
3. Internal linking – The internal linking in your website is important not only for SEO but also for providing easy navigation for visitors.

Domain Related

1. IP address – It is important in terms of the websites in your neighbourhood and also to identify where your website is physically located.
2. Country where hosted – This is identified by your IP address in most cases.
3. ccTLD – Search engines value which country domain your website belongs to e.g. co.uk when deciding results for the United Kingdom.
4. Age of website – The older the website, the more weight it carries in Search Engines.
5. Ownership changes – If ownership change is recent, this can nullify the gains of the Age factor, especially if the website changes significantly.

External Websites

External websites have a significant influence on your website in terms of visibility as well as links.

1. The link – How it points to your website matters. Is it a plain link or through some code.
2. The anchor text – The keywords used in this have an influence in the search results.
3. Link position on page – This influences the clickthrough as  well as the link value.
4. Link position within the website – This influences the clickthrough. Is it on a prominent page or in one of the inner pages.
5. Robots dofollow, nofollow status – Nofollow links are not followed nor is Page value passed on to your website.
6. Other links on the page – More the links on the page to other websites, less is the value passed to your website
7. Number of links from website to your website – This goes hand in hand with point 6.

Other Important Measures

These other factors are important to track and be aware of

1. Google Page Rank – This is just one of many measures to decide your websites position for a particular search query.
2. Compete, Quantcast, Alexa Data – This give information regarding traffic, growth rate, visitors and more.
3. Webserver used – This makes certain steps easier or harder depending on needs.
4. Programming Language used – This means for any troubleshooting, more skills are needed than for a static and simple website.
5. Scripts used – These can slow a website down if not done correctly or stop a page from loading altogether
6. Web 2.0 elements (Ajax, Flash, RSS) – Again these have to be used with care to avoid problems as mentioned in point 5 above.
7. CMS/Blog/Software used – Automated page generating software can lead to duplicate pages as multiple copies could get stored.
8. Security Certificates – These can influence the trust factor of your website especially if it is not well known.

All these factors together (there could be more) help us understanding the areas in which the website needs improvement.

TAGS > link building, seo, usability, website performance