10 ways to optimize your website
10 ways to optimize your website
What does it mean to optimize your website?
Google takes into account over 200 factors for ranking your website. These rankings determine where you show up in the Google search engine and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.
So why does it matter where you show up in the search engines?
Unless somebody knows your exact web address or has a link to your website, a search engine is the primary way for customers or clients to find your website. So if you have a website that you use to market a business or to promote an idea, of course, your main goal is for as many potential customers or clients to find your website.
There are other ways other than a search engine to help your chances of your website being found online by using popular social media sites and local business directories but when somebody needs something, the first and sometimes the only thing most people do is go to Google and type in their query and search. Think back to your own search habits: You’re most likely going to look at the top 3-5 search results and determine which one is the right link for you based on the title and description given.
So if you run a business and you want to be found on a regular basis, you need to have good search engine optimization so that you can competitively rank in the search engines in order to be able to be seen and clicked on.
So here is a list of some simple steps you can do today to optimize your website
Page Title
1. Page title – Your page title is the number 1 indicator to a search engine what your webpage is about. So if your page is about web design, then the words “web design” should be listed in your page title. If you’re not sure what your page title is currently, there are several ways to find out what your page title is for your webpage.
a. You can right-click and view page source. Once open, look for the title tag in the source code. Your title tag will look something like this <title>Worry Free Web Design and SEO | Rosalia WA</title>
b. Another way to view your page title is to use a browser extension called MozBar by Moz. This tool will also open a list of all of your key SEO tags for your webpage. https://moz.com/products/pro/seo-toolbar
c. If you’re using WordPress and have an SEO plug-in like Yoast, SEOPress, or any other SEO plugin, you can open up that page and scroll to the bottom and see what is defined in the page title field. These programs can also allow you to put in a default value in case you forget to add a page title. This can also be useful if you are adding specific page titles and want to add a default message behind it.
This can ultimately hurt your rankings because you will have duplicate page titles.
Meta Description
2. Meta-description – your meta-description is the description of your webpage. This is the section that comes up next to the page title in your search results. This does not directly affect your SEO ranking. The reason why it is important for your business, that you have a well-written meta-description, is that it can affect the click-through rate of your website. So if you’re searching for a specific item and you see it listed in the title and in the description field you know that you probably have the right website. Doing your meta-description is similar to the page title.
a. You can right-click and view page source. Then look for the meta-description tag in the source code. Your meta-description tag will look like this: <meta name=”description” content=”We are a small dedicated web design firm dedicated to help grow your business in Rosalia, WA, Spokane, and Kent, WA. We love helping people build their dreams.” />
b. Another way to view your meta-description is to use a browser extension called MozBar by Moz. This tool will also open a list of all of your key SEO tags for your webpage. https://moz.com/products/pro/seo-toolbar
c. If you’re using WordPress and have an SEO plug-in like Yoast, SEOPress, or another SEO plugin. You can open up that page and scroll to the bottom and see what is defined in the page description field.
Heading Tags
3. Headings – webpages use headings to define what is important and how important that item is. For example, if we were talking about cars, your H1 or heading 1 could be “Cars”. Your H2’s or heading 2 might be “Ford”,“ Chevy”, “ Honda”, “Dodge”. Your H3 tags or heading 3 for one of your H2’s could be, “Focus”, “Mustang”, “Fusion” and so on.
- H1 Cars
- H2 Ford
- H3 Focus
- H3 Mustang
- H2 Chevy
- H3 Malibu
- H3 Camaro
- H2 Ford
You will want to make sure that all major subjects on your website follow this type of formatting. This particular formatting gives Google or other search engines the information in an orderly fashion, so when Google reads the page and understands that this page is about cars in general and that there is also a breakdown of each specific brand and model. So, if you wanted a page focused on a Ford Mustang, you would make “Ford Mustang” the H1 term. You could then break down your H2 tags by model year or another distinctive factor of the Ford Mustang.
Keywords in Content
4. The next thing to look at after the Page Title, Meta-Description, and the Heading Tags on your webpage is going to be focusing on your keywords in your main content. It is considered a best practice to have your main keywords in the 1st or 2nd sentence of that page. You can also stress to search engines what is most important in your main content by using bold and italic letters. Just be aware to not overstress these words, though.
Alt Text
5. After looking at the keywords in your content, you’ll want to make sure all your images have proper alt text information. Alt text is designed for the reading impaired as an alternative to not being able to see the image. It basically describes the image in words. Google also looks at this to see what that image subject is about. It is best practice to make sure that all images on your website have proper alt text descriptions in them.
Schema
6. The next step to optimizing your webpage is to add schema information to it. This can be done by manually editing the page and adding tags. If you are using WordPress, there are many different plug-ins that can help you accomplish this. You can test your schema information with Google at this web address https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
Page Speed
7. Once you have your entire on-page SEO completed, it is time to look at the speed of your webpage. There are many different ways of testing the speed of your site. Here are three for examples.
a. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
This Google page speed webpage gives you a breakdown of both mobile and desktop versions of your website along with suggestions on what you can do to improve your site’s speed.
GTmetrix is a well-respected and preferred performance testing site for many web developers. It breaks down several different aspects of your website and gives recommendations on how you can improve the site’s speed as well.
pingdom tools also breaks down your website and get suggestions that allow you to select different locations in the world to test from.
Each website has its own unique way of breaking down your website and I recommend using each of them to help determine more factors you can change or tweak to help speed up your website.
Image optimization
8. One of the biggest factors in your website’s performance is image size. If your images are not optimized for a webpage, they will slow your website down considerably. Google takes your site speed into consideration and when images slow it down, you will lose rankings and more importantly, customers. The average consumer will wait 3 seconds for a web page to load. After that, the chances of them clicking off increase significantly. So speed matters!
There are many different programs you can use for adjusting your image size and quality. Here are a couple of websites that can help you.
· https://resizeimage.net/
· https://www.browserling.com/tools/png-to-jpg
You can also use programs like Adobe Photoshop, gimp, and paint.net to mention a few more.
I personally use paint.net just because I have used it for years and am familiar with the tools. It is free to use and fairly easy to pick up for non-graphic designers. If you are looking for the best overall program, I would recommend Adobe Photoshop but bear in mind that it does require a monthly service agreement to use.
You’ll want to try to get your images the same size as the container your webpage is holding them in. This way they are not being reduced or increased to fit that container. You also want to save them in a JPEG form if possible, because of the quality and size of the file. If you are using an image that needs to show the background around it or you need to see through it, PNG files work great for that but keep in mind that the trade-off is they are larger and require longer loading times. PNG files work great for logos and other images that are going to be sitting on a webpage with the background showing behind it.
One of the best tools for determining which images need to be adjusted is built into chrome. If you right-click on your webpage and select “inspect,” it will show you many different aspects of your webpage. If you select the network tab and refresh your webpage, you will see all the network resources needed and the load time for your page. Along with that, you will see a column called size. Here you can scroll through and see which images are the largest and how long they are taking to load in milliseconds. This tool is handy for finding your one-off image that is too large and slowing down your webpage. For example, if you have 10 images on a webpage and nine of them are approximately 30 kB and one of them is 400 kB, you know that the 400 kB file is slowing down your webpage. This is usually because that file is too large for the container is placed in. Meaning your file maybe 600 x 600 and the container you’re trying to stuff it in is 240 x 240. Doing this requires your web browser to adjust the size of that image to 240 x 240 but the download will still be the original size of the file, which is slowing your webpage down.
Title Attribute
9. Another way to improve your SEO value on a webpage is to set the title attribute. For example, each menu item has a name and a title attribute. This title attribute shows when you hover over a link for that menu item. When you hover over it, it will display the text that is put into your title attribute. The Title Attribute is similar to the alt text of an image. When a search engine is crawling your website and sees your menu and it says “web design,” it will also see a title attribute that is defined as ”web design,” reinforcing the importance and description of that link. This attribute is also found in the anchor text.
Internal linking
10. On-page linking helps when search engines crawl your webpage and also help customers navigate your website easier. By linking content to web pages with relevant information on it about those keywords, you are adding importance and SEO relevance to that webpage. If you are on a page about cars, like the previous examples, you want your writing to be about Ford Mustang and you have a page solely dedicated to Ford Mustang. You would want to create a link in your content using the words Ford Mustang to the webpage for Ford Mustang.
Conclusion
There are many ways to optimize your website. The important thing is to remember that each page needs to be optimized individually. Remember that each page is its’ own landing page for the main keyword that you are trying to rank for.
There are many online tools that can help you accomplish this. These tools range from free to quite expensive with a learning curve of fast to very difficult and long.
There are also many videos on YouTube that you can watch to help you accomplish these as well.
I also provide SEO services if you want SEO but you’d rather be hands-off. I’ll take the difficulty off your hands. Please contact me at www.worryfreewebdesignandseo.com
What are your thoughts? Leave me a comment below.
These are 10 ways to optimize your website.