Website Quality Factors, or “Q Factors” And The “Q Score”
In Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the principal objectives are to 1) maximize the number and length of unique and return visits to your website (or blog), and 2) create the greatest possible authority ranking for your site (as measured by such ranking services as Alexa). Putting aside the old-school mechanical tricks of keyword-stuffing, adding re-spun pages to your site to increase its size, obtaining backlinks into your site from high PR-ranked blogs, directories and other e-media, submitting and resubmitting your site’s address to multiple search engines and utilizing aggressive social media campaigning, the ultimate key is to increase your site’s “Q Factors,” thereby increasing its “Q Rating.”
Following are some highly useful guidelines in increasing your site’s Q Rating. It is best to keep these factors in mind during every step you take in designing and adding content and other informational resources to your site. The higher your site’s Q Rating, the better it will generally be rated in all of the other areas that matter.
Here’s a simple checklist of the factors which either positively or negatively influence your site’s Q Rating - the idea is to constantly work on increasing the positives and on decreasing the negatives:
High-quality factors:
- Unique content that is an excellent resource.
- Your product or service presented optimally - this means with time and effort spent on description, photos, or whatever else is required.
- A brand name.
- A dedicated IP.
- Long-term domain name ownership.
- No adverts on the front page.
- High-quality website code that validates and has a good accessibility score.
- A dedicated server.
- A dedicated nameserver.
- Good traffic - especially via SERPs clickthroughs.
- Avoidance of all 'obvious SEO' measures on the site or in the content.
Low-quality factors:
- Duplicate content, scraped content, extensive RSS feed content, content with too many 'possible duplicate' signals, content with too many 'low-quality' signals.
- A low-cost domain such as .info, as these were sold cheaply by the million.
- A shared hosting server with 3,000 other sites on the server.
- Lots of adverts on the front page.
- Low-quality website code which is full of errors, and a poor accessibility score.
- No address and contact details on the site.
The task for all website and blog owners is to maximize the Q Rating of their sites, and to avoid relying on either robotic or automated “shortcuts” in establishing the visibility of your sites. When you increase your Q Rating, you increase your longer-term “core” site strength, and minimize the likelihood of getting your site blacklisted by search engines or directories that truly want to give their clients honest results.
A service which issues Q ratings to websites and blogs is SearchSight. You may submit your site to them at no cost, and have them give you their assessment of your Q Rating.
Time to “Q it up!” fellow website owners and bloggers.
Douglas E. Castle
CFI - CrowdFunding Incubator
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