The internet is the primary source for people to find information about organizations, products, and services. As an organization, it is important to make sure that the content on your website accurately represents your organization and is displayed in a professional manner. However, sometimes people spend too much money and time on aesthetics to increase website quality, when there are many free tools available to help enhance the message and increase the quality. Quoin understands that taking advantage of these can help ensure that your website is running well from a technical standpoint, is compliant with best SEO practices, and is user friendly.
Insights
Web Quality Tools
Megs ThamanNovember 17, 2016
The tools Quoin has found most useful for assessing web quality come from a number of sources. The available tests shown below provide a way to ensure that your site meets the industry standards. Although these tests do not guarantee a higher quality, they do offer guidance and suggestions for improvement.
HTML and CSS
HTML (the Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are two of the core technologies for building web pages. HTML provides the structure of the page, and CSS provides the visual layout of the page. Using these, developers can define how structural elements are represented on browsers. It is important to make sure there are no outstanding errors in either of these.
Mobile Friendly/ Responsive
People are more frequently using their phones or tablets for web searches. A mobile friendly website is designed to display properly on smaller screens (iPhone, Android, tablets). A responsive site is designed to automatically render the correct version of the site, based on the device being used. These tests will show if your site complies with mobile standards.
- Mobile Validator
- Mobile Friendly Test
- Mobile Usability
Page Speed
Search engines, particularly Google, use page speed as a ranking signal. This is because if a site loads fast, chances are better that users will remain on your website. A score of 85 or above on each page is considered a good result.
Linking
Broken links are connected with a poor SEO ranking. It is good to have both internal and external links, but they should all be active, functioning links. You can manually check all of the links on your site, and you can use these tests to check for broken links.
Keywords and Meta Data
Each page of your site should have a unique keyword, meta description, and title tag. These give a unique identity and a brief overview of page content to search engines. These tests will show which pages are missing these items and if there are any duplicates.
- HTML Improvements
- Content Keywords
- Meta Tag Analyzer
Accessibility
Accessibility means that the content of your website can be accessed by everyone. It enables individuals with visual, hearing, movement, and cognitive abilities to use the site. The industry standards from the W3C Accessibility Initiative include best practices for keyboard input support, transcripts for audio content, and alternate text for images. You can also use this test to check the accessibility of your site.
Once the URL structure of the site is established, HTML and XML sitemaps need to be created and submitted to search engines, allowing them to index the pages. It is important to make sure that the sitemaps don't have errors.
