Nowadays websites have become a basic need for any kind of business. And there are huge number of web development firms. If you are planning to get a website developed for your business, you may want to know more about it. You must be wondering about what should be included in a website, is there any standard to be followed in websites. Here is the list of “must have” on a website and how you can check them by yourself, easily.
12 Key elements of website
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CTA
CTA stands for Call To Action. CTAs are simple Call Now/Book Now/Enquire Now buttons present on a page. Some designs can include complete form to capture leads. CTAs are very important part of a website, you should place them carefully, as they help you to capture leads. You should check your website for CTAs, at least one CTA should be available on every page.
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Sitemap
A sitemap is a map of links on your website which shows all the pages and their positions. A sitemap can be helpful for your visitors to find information easily. It also helps search engines to crawl your website properly. You can include Link to sitemap in footer. Create a sitemap for search engines like google, bing in XML form and place it in sitemap.xml – should be accessible from www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
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Search Engine Friendly URLs
Search Engine Friendly URLs look like – www.yourwebsite.com/about-us/ while urls like – “www.yourwebsite.com/?pageid=21” or “www.yourwebsite.com/?page=about” etc are not Search Engine friendly. After your domain name page name should be there between 2 slashes and nothing else. Some page can have URLs like – “www.yourwebsite.com/products/ABCProduct/”, this type of URLs are Search Engine friendly URLs. You can check by simply visiting each page and compare the URL’s with page name. But keep in mind URLs can not contain empty spaces so in place of spaces use dash(-). So URL of page “Contact Us” will look like www.yourwebsite.com/contact-us/.
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404 Page
When your visitor lands on a page which is either misspelled or removed, they will be redirected to 404 page. A 404 Page should tell user that you are on wrong page and should provide a way to return to your website. Best way is to provide the main navigation on top and footer along with 404 message in middle. For example visit – http://www.abhisheksachan.com/this-should-open-404-page . To check the 404 page on your website open a page like – www.yourwebsite.com/about/ and change the name of page in url like – www.yourwebsite.com/about123/ if no page with this name exists it should open a 404 page, else you can try adding more words to your web address.
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Social Media Links
You should always connect your social media handles with your website. Link Social media Handles in header and/or footer. You can check for social media links like Facebook, twitter, linked in, youtube channels etc in header or footer. Upon clicking them they should open your social media handle in new tab. Make sure you link them to correct pages and they always open in new tab.
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Meta Tags
Meta tags are added for bots, they help us to introduce our web page to search engines bots. For example you can tell search engines that http://www.yourwebsite.com/about-us/ is your about page. This enables search engines to show about page when someone search about history of your business. To check Meta tags open Page source by clicking CTRL+U in Firefox & Chrome. On source page search for “description” by pressing CTRL+F. If you can find a line like -<meta name=”description” content=”***“/>. *** will be introduction to the page. Similarly you can look for keywords by searching for keywords.
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Visitors Tracking
Google Analytics & Webmasters code. – If you have a website you would also like to know how many users visited your website, how they interacted etc. Tools like Google Analytics are provided by google for free. To check the existence of Google Analytics code and that too correctly. You will be able to see visitors in Google Analytics panel else you can check on http://www.gachecker.com/ for Analytics code.
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W3 Validation
W3 Validation is very important. It helps in resolving various error on website, also a W3 validated site is indexed properly on search engines. To validate your website on w3 go to https://validator.w3.org/ put your website link in the field provided and press enter. A validation report along with errors & warnings(if any) will appear. You need to concentrate on errors, there should be no error on the page. Warnings can be ignored after a discussion with developer.
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Responsive Website
Responsive website will work on mobile as well. Google is ranking mobile compatible websites on top than the ones not working on mobile. Try opening your website on different Mobile Phones and tablets. It should look good and information should be clearly visible in all screen sizes.
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Grade A Website
There are lots of tools to analyze your website’s performance. Fast loading webpages generate more revenue than the one running slow. A slow webpage can result in your visitors frustration and lead to loss of visitors. All your webpages should be A grade on below tools to perform properly. To check the performance report go to https://gtmetrix.com/ enter your web address and press enter. Within a minute it will show you a performance report. Performance score should be more than 80%(at least) 90+ is considered to be best, Page load time should not be more than 3 secs. You can check below for different stats and reports.
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Broken Links
Broken links are those links on your website which will take user to a 404 page or any error page. You should regularly check for broken links whenever you make changes on website. A broken link can lead to the user frustration and result in loss of users. Lots of tools exists on internet for checking broken links. Try opening – http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ and put the address of website. You will see list of working and broken links.
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Duplicate Content
Content Duplication is not good for your website health. Search engines may rank your website lower just because of duplicate content. You should always check for good quality content. You can hire professional content writer.
Hope you liked the article. In case I missed something please leave comments I’ll include in the article.
