Optimize Your Website

Optimizing a website can refer to search engine optimization, which increases your website's ranking on search engines, or to performance optimization, which ensures that your website runs quickly and smoothly. Learn how search engines rank sites and discover keywords to attract new visitors to your site. Dive into the code and look for improvements to keep your visitors around, instead of waiting for a page to load.

Steps

Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines

  1. Analyze and study your website. The first and one of the most important steps to SEO is to analyze your website to determine what changes, if necessary, should be made. This process includes assessing the site navigation, context, and overall cosmetics of the website. It is a good practice to develop a task sheet to better proceed with the optimization of the website. Focus on the individual goals and objectives that are trying to be accomplished and use these as a means of providing the most sufficient results. Meaning – if you have a site that specializes in sales of sports memorabilia, your content should be relevant and revolve around information pertinent to sports memorabilia, not some off topic content such as baseball records. Search engines look at domain names, title tags, and header tags to assist them in ranking the website according to relevance. It is important to maintain consistency in text with the subject of your site.
  2. Determine your competition's website. By knowing your competition in the industry, you will gain a better understanding of what exactly needs to be accomplished. It is helpful to find the top 5-10 competitors in your industry and find out what methods they are employing (they are at the top of the search engines aren’t they?). This process also helps with generating valuable keywords for your website. If you have a site promoting “cheap football tickets” it might be a good idea to go after “discount football tickets” versus “cheap football tickets”. Not only will the keywords be more geared towards your site's intentions, but they will also bring in more relevant traffic to the site if ranked high enough in the search engines. Relevant traffic = Return on Investment (ROI).
  3. Use-Meta-Tags. HTML's meta tag does not alter the content visible on the website; they exist only for search engines and other bots. Place a title tag at the top of each page to identify the document's overall content. Write an accurate meta description tag, since it is often used by search engines to describe a site in search results. Add a meta keyword tag as well to reveal the most important keywords for each page to search engine bots.
    • Note that Google's search bots do not look at meta keywords, but other search engines may. Meta tags, however, are not the end all solution to search engine optimization. They are critical in helping the spiders index the pages – that is, for the search engines that still support them, but will still not skyrocket your rankings to the top of the search engines. Make sure your keywords are relevant to what is on the page. If there is no mention of “Golf Clubs” on that page, it makes no sense to include those words in your website. Keep the description tag brief and to the point. Avoid non-indexable words such as where, too, and etc. Incorporating some keywords in the description is often helpful as long as it makes sense. The more descriptive the tag is towards the content, the better your site will fare in the rankings.
  4. Do-Keyword-Research. Identify keywords related to your site's content. These can be popular search terms that lead people to your site, words related to your overall topic, and the topic of a specific page or blog post. If you're not sure which keywords are popular search terms, there are services online that can help you evaluate keywords, many of them with free trials. Try KeywordSpy or WordTracker.
    • Create a spreadsheet and start listing as many words as possible relating to your website. Focus on every little product, every subject that encompasses the concept of the website. It is not uncommon for your list to reach close to or over 1000 keywords here. Once you are finished, sort the list by alphabetizing and removing the duplicate words. Then single out the words that are the most descriptive of your site. You will now need to find and use a word tracker program to help analyze the keywords and determine how many times those words are searched for in a day (there are many tools freely available via Google). This process will help you find the most popular keywords that are relevant to the content of your site.
  5. Place keywords strategically throughout your content. Having keyword-rich content is the key to performing well with search engines. Some search engine bots may penalize you for keyword spamming, however, so learn where to focus your efforts:
    • Use the keywords liberally on your home page.
    • Include keywords in header tags, title tags, and meta tags.
    • Include keywords in the anchor text used to describe links.
    • Use keywords in the URL of new pages.
  6. Use alt tags to describe your images. This makes them searchable by search engine bots, which cannot otherwise detect what is in your images. If you can, include a keyword or two in these descriptions, but keep the description accurate.
  7. Develop some base traffic reports. These reports are used to determine the current traffic to your website to see what kind of activity is taking place, where your traffic is coming from, and what pages are the most popular on your website as well as how they currently rank. If you are not already monitoring your web traffic you will want to do this for at least a month to get a feel for your current volume. Statcounter is good for monitoring.This step is crucial in the SEO process because these reports will also be used to gauge previous activity to your optimized performance.
  8. Revise the web content to better suit your keywords. It should include several variations of web pages, and may also require the modification of some of the content and code. You will want to create a site map, and incorporate a search engine as well as adding a forum or a blog, a resources page, etc. All of this plays an important role in Search Engine Optimization and assists in satisfying the likes of the popular search engines.
  9. Keep providing new content. Good Web content is a critical factor in keeping site visitors interested and coming back for more. This in turn will lead to higher search engine rankings. When writing new content, keep in mind that each page should have at least 250 words.
  10. Get other websites to link to you. Building good incoming or back links can also increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. List your website in relevant directories and forums, and ask websites on similar topics to link to content on your website. Most major search engines rank web pages based partially on the number and the quality of links that point to the site.
  11. Create a site map. Site maps are XML files that list every URL in your website. Your web host may provide this file, or you may have to make it yourself. Find an example site map file and replace the example URLs with URLs of pages on your website. Once every page is listed, upload it to the root folder of your web server. Submit the link to this site map to Google and other major search engines.
    • Search online for "submit a sitemap" to find sites where you can submit your link.
    • You may also hire a service to make a sitemap for you.
  12. Avoid using frames whenever possible. Frames, which are being used less and less, enable you to split a page into pieces and section off static content to decrease download times. However, using frames can prevent search engine bots from accessing your entire website.
    • Providing a site map may mitigate this problem.
  13. Validate your HTML code. While search engines don't care whether your HTML code is error-free, they rely on the basic correctness of the code to find out which portions of your web page to index. If your HTML code contains errors, it is possible that only portions of your web page are included in the search engine's database. Use W3C or another site to validate your HTML, checking it for errors.
  14. Build link popularity with your website. One of the most common misconceptions to search engine optimization is that if you swap links your site will gain in popularity. Relevant traffic is what is important here and linking to any old Tom, Dick or Harry will flat out hurt rankings before anything else. Search Engine Algorithms are focused on relevance. What you want to do is cross-link with a site that offers similar content or related material, which will benefit you and the person you are linking with. If your website is about collecting, hobbies, and sports, you do not want to link with someone who collects recipes, or focuses on politics.
  15. Include paid content and CPC if necessary. Paid inclusion and Cost Per Click are options that are also available. There is a good article about paid inclusion as a means of countering the rising cost of CPC prices, which can be read here: Target Marketing Mag
  16. Re-optimize continually. Optimizing a website is not enough to maintain the top spots in search engines for your most important keywords. Algorithms are always changing, and so is the industry. This step is optional but it is highly encouraged you continuously optimize your site.
  17. Monitor and report continuously. The best way to judge the success of your optimizing efforts is to continuously monitor and analyze your traffic. It will continuously offer clues as to which pages are performing the best, keep you aware of consumer interests, and most of all to see what is and what is not working.

Optimizing Your Website's Performance

  1. Reduce your use of intensive applications. Website that overuse Flash or Java Applet can take much longer to load. Try not to rely on these for your basic web page, and don't make Flash videos play automatically.
    • Video popups are a big culprit in slow web pages as well, and may irritate your users.
  2. Optimize your images. Large, high quality images can slow down your website considerably, and may burn through your server hosting space as well. Use Photoshop, or a free image editing program such as GIMP, to optimize your photos for the web. In Photoshop, you can simply click File → Save for Web. If editing images manually, you can reduce image resolution to 72 dpi, and set the color space to sRGB.[1]
  3. Enable GZIP compression on the server. GZIP compresses text files by locating similar strings of text and temporarily replacing them with smaller strings, to make files smaller while sending between the server and the user's computer. Follow these instructions to enable GZIP.
  4. Use a Javascript debounce function when necessary. If you are using Javascript, frequent repetition of the same request can slow down a browser's performance considerably. Add a debounce function to prevent another function from firing more frequently than you specify. Limiting a function to firing once every 250 milliseconds is a good starting point.[2]
  5. Minify CSS and Javascript code. Minification removes all unnecessary characters from code, typically white space, new lines, and comments. Use Closure Compiler to minify Javascript for free, or find an optimizer for the type of code you are working with.
    • You will still be able to edit your code with the human-readable organization. The code is minified only when it is uploaded to the server.
  6. Use the latest version of PHP. Make sure you are using the latest version of PHP, so you can benefit from the latest improvements. While the PHP developers try to keep the language backwards-compatible, you will probably need to spend some time updating your code in accordance with the latest changes.
  7. Check your site's caching methods. If your web page caches files locally, your server won't receive a new request every time that user visits your site again. If you have a high traffic website, caching can be a significant improvement. Search online for a web page cache test to find out whether your site is caching images and files, and research ways to improve your caching method.
  8. Use a third-party website evaluator and optimizer. Third-party programs such as Google PageSpeed or Yahoo YSlow analyze your web page and attempt to find areas that could be improved. Some may automatically optimize parts of your website for you.
    • If you have a high-traffic website, consider hiring a service that both optimizes and protects you from DDOS attacks.



Tips

  • A great way to build natural and permanent links to your website is through submitting articles to other websites, each of which contains one or more live links pointing to your business’ site. By writing good articles to other sites, you are increasing your chances of being found in the search engines for the keywords that are relevant to your business.

Warnings

  • Do not over-stuff your pages with keywords. "Keyword spamming" can be punished with a low ranking by many search engines.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/how-to-save-images-web/
  2. ↑ http://davidwalsh.name/javascript-debounce-function
Retrieved from "https://kipkis.com/index.php?title=Optimize_Your_Website&oldid=360644"