Optimising your website requires many different skills and tactics to come together for your website. First, let’s look at your websites homepage. There are lots you can do to increase your rank on search engines, it still amazes me how few websites make even the most simplest of changes which could have incredible effects on their sites placement.
If like all websites, unless you are in the dark ages, you have images on your website then make them work for you. By editing the ‘ALT’ tag you can give the images a name which contains keywords so to be useful when search engines spiders trawl through your sites html code. If your website was on classic car sales and you label your images as ‘car 1′ this will have very little impact for the spiders but if you try naming a picture of an Aston Martin as ‘classic Austin Martin’ this would only serve to help your sites rankings. But also important to naming your images is that not all visitors to your website will see it the same way that you see it on your screen. Some businesses and users do not view images on sites and turns those functions off. By turning images off on their browser this allows for faster speeds when visiting sites and controls what employees can see. By giving ‘ALT’ names to images that say what they are you will enhance the visitors experience as well as helping to increase your ranking. When working with images on your website, you will need to optimise images either using a program like Photoshop or one online. When a visitor to your website has to wait for photos to load, they may quickly decide against waiting even one second longer. Remember, the longer it takes for a page to load the quicker the visitor will want to leave. Keep page loads within a few seconds if possible.
Now look at your website. Many web surfers will visit a website for only a few seconds before they make a decision of whether or not this site will have what they are looking for. Some surfers don’t even wait for the page to load before leaving a website. You need to give them a reason to stay by telling them the most important information in a quick and fast way. Think of a newspaper, they can not tell you the whole of the newspaper on just the front page. They put headlines that guide you through the paper. These headlines grab your attention. This same process can be used for website optimisation. Try bullet pointing the information so visitors can quickly see what your site can offer them
Put navigation links on the bottom of your sites pages too. Very useful if you have pages where users need to scroll down a long ways.
Don’t add useless pages or extras that distract visitors and confuse them. Your website will be wanting to either get contact details or sell something. Having an about us page is nice to have but trust me these are very rarely if ever read. The same applies to scripts which are not necessary like background music or snow falling on the screen. Incredibly tacky and annoying for visitors.
As a professional designer for many years I know that flash websites are just not going to rank as well as their ‘html’ counterparts. The reason is rather simple, search engine spiders can’t trawl them as there is no code there for them to read. They are also looked upon rather unfavourably as not everyone can view them unless they download the plug ins necessary to view flash video. Although this is becoming more common and more and more people are downloading the plug ins, it just is not currently viewable by everyone as the standard ‘html’ websites are. It’s all looks but no substance.
Now we get onto keywords, the hot subject. Choose key phrases rather than individual words. Think what would people type to find your website. Ask friends & family too. If you sold cars in Kent, UK don’t choose ‘cars’ as a keyword, try ‘Kent secondhand cars’ or ‘car dealerships Kent’, about 10 to 13 key phrases are sufficient. Don’t keep repeating words over and over again. Also, unless you are a major corporation such as Nike or Xerox, you need not mention your companies actual name in the keyword or description tags.
The description tag should also contain some keywords in there and be about 25 - 30 words but don’t over do it. This description is important as it shows up in searches. This brings me onto the title of your pages. Don’t just say ‘Home’, put in a few keywords there too. This title tag is shown above the description text on search engines so write wisely. For a car dealership it would be more effective for a visitor to Goggle to see a title tag that says ‘Find second hand cars in Kent, everything from cars, 4×4’s, to trucks’ rather than ‘Dales Motors’. See what I mean, which would you click?
It is very important to make sure you do not have any ‘dead links’ or ‘broken links’ from your website either linking within your site or to another one. This infuriates visitors and does not look good when search engines come to dead links while trawling your website. Dreamweaver can check for broken links with it’s own software but there are many free online broken link checkers out there.
