3 Ways To Optimize Your Website

It is a good practice to develop a task sheet to better proceed with the optimization of the website. Remember that search engines look at domain names, title tags, and header tags to assist them in ranking the website according to relevance. Thus, it is important to maintain consistency in text with the subject of your site.

While you don’t want to copy competitor websites outright, knowing their strategies will help you identify weak points in your own.

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.

Place a meta title tag at the top of each page to identify the document’s overall content to search engines. 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. Keep in mind that Google’s search bots do not look at meta keywords, but other search engines often do.

Statcounter is good for monitoring. This step is crucial in the SEO process because the reports will also be used to gauge activity prior to your optimized performance.

Update your content at least once per week for optimal results. Site optimization is an ongoing effort. It’s all about matching and exceeding your competitors.

Most major search engines rank web pages based partially on the number and the quality of links that point to the site. Finding a journalist or website owner who will cover your website and link to it will create an organic piece of content which may boost your search results listing.

Search online for “submit a sitemap” to find sites where you can submit your link. Having a site map will also help you keep track of your current links, allowing you to update or remove non-working links as part of your optimization efforts. Remember to update your site map as you replace or update links. Nothing turns people off to your site more than hosting broken links.

Providing a site map may fix this problem.

You can use W3C or another site to validate your HTML by checking it for errors.

Generating a new report each month will give you an idea of which keywords are most successful (and which ones are falling flat), allowing you to increase usage of the proper ones and remove the inefficient ones. Keywords change alongside their respective trends, so monitor and update your keywords as your website’s audience changes. Or you can Chose a keyword which have more density.

When effective, CTAs improve the amount of time for which readers stay on your site. Providing internal links in your CTA will keep the reader engaged with your content. Avoid linking to external (e. g. , other website) resources in your CTAs.

Using recognizable words instead of strings of numbers will be especially helpful when encouraging others to view a specific page on your site by sending them a link, as they’ll be able to see at a glance what the page is about. Most website hosting services have an option to use title-based links rather than procedurally generated (numerical) links in the Settings section.

A great 404 page should include a link to the main site, a table of contents for popular links, and a concise but light-hearted message informing the user that they’ve entered a broken link. As with most accessibility features, you can usually create a 404 page from within your website hosting service’s Settings page.

If possible, implementing an in-site “Search” function will also help users search your site for more specific content or features. Even if your “navigation” section is just a row of title tabs across the top of the website’s home page, having the option to jump between pages is valuable.

This doesn’t mean that your overall content needs to be short; your content should be at least 350 words, and in some cases may perform better in the 800 to 2000 word range.

Try visiting your site from a mobile browser and looking for issues or irritating features. This will help you determine which parts of the design require your attention.

This is an issue with sites which automatically play embedded (e. g. , YouTube) videos as well.

Most website hosting services also offer an option to load images as viewers scroll down rather than loading a whole page’s worth of images at once. While images are important when attempting to make your site more attractive, they can considerably slow down traffic from slower browsers and platforms. Don’t overuse images.

Closure Compiler by Google can minify Javascript for free, while other free minimizers can be applied to different types of code (e. g. , HTML). 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.

If you’re using a website hosting service such as WordPress or Weebly, you shouldn’t have to worry about manually updating your website’s PHP.

Any users who clear their browser’s cache and cookies before revisiting your site won’t benefit from this, but the bulk of people who come across your site will be positively impacted.