When designing a website, you shouldn’t just be creating a pretty layout. You should be establishing a highly-functional and interactive app that’s user-friendly and productive. Your website can drive substantial amounts of traffic to your business, but only if it’s optimized correctly.
Need help with website optimization? You’re reading the right article. We’re going to discuss exactly what it is and why you need it.
What Does It Mean to Optimize a Website?
Website optimization is the process of making a website perfect. Though you may never quite achieve this, your attempt to do so will produce a website that is highly functional and effective.
There are several components involved in optimizing a website. They include the following:
Keyword Optimization
When creating a website, you should be pursuing SEO or Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of getting a website to rank for certain keywords in search engines. It begins with the proper use of keywords on your website.
If your website used to represent your HVAC business in Kansas City, for instance, you would use keywords to the effect of “HVAC services in Kansas City,” and “Kansas City HVAC.” These keywords would indicate to search engines that your website should be grouped along with other HVAC businesses in Kansas City and the Kansas City area.
Keywords like these should be used not only on your website pages but on your website’s blog posts as well. Over time, as the content on your website increases, your website will gain clout with its chosen keywords and rank higher for those keywords when they’re searched on Google.
Speed Optimization
When it comes to the functionality of a website, few aspects are as important as load speed. If a website takes 10 seconds to load, for example, it’s going to turn off visitors on a wide scale. If its pages load in under 3 seconds, most visitors will stick around.
As such, you need to do what you can to optimize the speed of your website. There are a few different steps you can take.
First of all, you need to minimize the size of your images. Yes, larger file sizes produce greater image quality, but they also slow down a website substantially. The key is to use an image size that loads quickly without causing the image to become blurry or pixelated.
Another thing you can do to optimize load speed is to minify your website’s code. The less code your website needs to function, the faster it will load. Some widgets can auto-minify websites on content management systems, but if the website is built from scratch, only a skilled programmer will be able to minify it.
Your web host will affect your page load speed as well. As such, it’s often wise to pay a little more money for hosting.
There are many other things you can do to speed up a website, but the tactics discussed above will make the biggest difference. If you need further help, think about using website management services.
Navigation Optimization
When a user comes to a website, he or she is usually looking for something specific. For instance, if a user comes to a plumbing website, he or she is seeking a little more information on the company’s plumbing services. Also, he or she is looking for contact information.
The goal of the website should be to make the finding of this information as simple as possible. This is where navigation optimization comes in.
The main tenet of navigation optimization is to make the navigation menu obvious. As such, it’s wise to have it posted at the top of the site.
That said, the primary navigation menu shouldn’t be the only way that users can get from page to page. You need to post links and buttons throughout the rest of each page as well.
This way, if the user reads something further down the page, he or she can find out more about it by clicking a button (as opposed to scrolling back up to the top of the page).
The easier your website is to use, the more that visitors will, well, use it. So, focus on getting your visitors from point A to point B as quickly and as seamlessly as possible.
Meta Optimization
As far as SEO website optimization goes, meta optimization is of huge importance. This includes the underlying information contained within a website. It’s helpful to search engines, as it helps them determine what a website is about.
There are all kinds of meta information that need to be optimized, from image data to headers to title tags to page descriptions and more. It’s also important to maintain a sitemap, as it can help search engines to more easily index your website’s pages.
When optimizing your meta information, you need to think about utilizing keywords. For instance, when creating an image alt tag, you should use the designated keyword for the page or blog post you’re working on.
At the same time, however, you need to use this information naturally. Don’t just stuff keywords into the placeholders. Search engines will penalize you for those sorts of tactics.
Whatever you do, don’t avoid creating meta information. Avoiding it will hurt your SEO clout, and will make it more difficult for search engines to trust you.
Website Optimization Is Vital
If you want to get the most out of your website, you have to put a priority on website optimization. An optimized website is aesthetically pleasing, user-intuitive, and functionally effective.
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