Five Optimizations Your Website Needs
There was a time when having a website gave you a distinct advantage over your competition. Not anymore. Now that Websites are affordable, more and more people are getting them, which naturally is increasing the competition for you and your space on the web.
So the question is no longer, "should you get a Website", but rather "What can you do to ensure you are ahead of your competition?".
Here are 5 optimizations that will greatly help improve your Website.
Add Alt Tags To Images
Alt tags add a name or title to images on your website. When you hold your mouse over an image the tag is displayed. These tags are important for 3 reasons. The first is that they allow visitors to your website to view a title of an image of your choosing by hovering their mouse as mentioned above. The second reason is that your image alt names are displayed if the images are not. This means that if a visitor has images turned off they will still see the alt name. The last reason is purely for SEO purposes as alt tags mean search engines such as Google can better clasify your Websites images and therefore view your site in a much better light.
To implement them, simply add the alt="image name" in your code. ie. <img src="/Image Location" alt="image alt tag">
Use H1 and H2 Tags
H1 tags a type of HTML tag that displays your site content in a larger "heading" style. They are part of a group consisting of H1 (largest) through H6 (smallest). The point of these tags is 2-fold in that they not only allow you quick and easy formatting of your site content, but they tell the search engines which content on your site is a heading and therefore worthy of more weighting when it comes to importance.
As web browsers automatically recognise these tags and display accordingly, Use of them also removes the need to individually govern the font size and weight of your content.
To use, simply put your chosen content between the appropriate tags, ie. <h1>content</h1>, <h2>content</h2>, and so on.
Ensure Good Meta Content
Meta tags have been around for a long time and are not considered as important now as they once used to be. That isn't to say they are not needed. In fact in my opinion they are as important now as they ever were. They are found at the top of your code between the <head> and </head> tags.
While there are quite a few different meta tags available, there are two which I suggest you always use. They are keywords and description.
Use of them is as follows:
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords, separated, by, keywords" />
<meta name="description" content="a description of your site or page content" />
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
Regardless of how much you may want it, you are never going to dominate every keyword phrase for your website. By over-extending your keyword usage you are in fact damaging your Websites potential. To remedy this, choose a few carefully selected phrases that you want to be associated with your Website and target your site content around those phrases. Include them in your H1 tags, your meta tags and on your site content, inluding the alt tags of your images.
Dump HTML for CSS Styling
Please, whatever you do don't use old HTML formatting for content. Taking the time to learn CSS will save you a LOT of time in the future. CSS or Custom Style Sheets allow you to style your content much faster and much for efficiently than with HTML, and will cut down the load time of your page dramatically, therefore improving visitor satisfaction.
Need help reviewing and optimizing your Website? Please feel free to contact me.
