It’s easy to make sweeping statements about what a website should be, if it’s to rank well in the search engines. It’s a lot harder to assess whether a site actually hits the mark. I recently read a different way of looking at things though. A good site is one that the search engines would be embarrassed not to be showing as a result for a given search.
It’s easy to look at one of our own web pages and think: “That’s pretty good”. But view it from the other end of the telescope and we might also admit that if the page didn’t appear in the search engine results, the world wouldn’t mourn its omission. We should ask the question: “What is this page doing that no other page is doing?” That’s what the page ought to be ranking on (and probably is). If we want it to rank highly for a generic term covered on many websites, we need to be doing something quite special.