It is said that there is no low priority aspect when it comes to optimizing a website, everything counts. You need everything done right, from keywords to linking and programming structure. All of those things affect the overall ranking of your website. Also, don’t forget the content! Therefore, let’s talk about the critical aspects of website optimization, the aspects that one should look into thoroughly.
The first thing you need to sort out is your website accessibility. There are a few key points you need to keep an eye on or the search engines may penalize your website. Start with basic things, like the link functionality. If you already have broken links, search engines may degrade your ranking, not to mention the people browsing your website. They will feel frustrated if the links they click on are not working.
After checking for broken links, you need to check the validity of your HTML and CSS. People may say that this is not an important part, but actually it is very important. If your website doesn’t follow some rules set by the W3C guidelines, search engines may crawl your site and find errors. They may misinterpret some of the things which will eventually affect your rankings.
You also need to maintain high functionality of your website. There is a saying in SEO, the simpler the better. Too many Java scripts, element block content and select boxes may cause search engines to miss some pages. Be sure to directly link the relevant pages on your website, since crawlers follow links.
Another thing to keep an eye on is the file size. Search bots, spiders, crawlers, call them what you like, have a limit. They can and will only index pages and their content up to 150K. They will index your page if it exceeds that amount, but they may not index it completely. This means that some of your most important content on a certain page will not be indexed. Not to mention that having files of a smaller size on your pages will also allow your pages to open faster. This helps the visitors greatly. You need to keep your site optimized, since both search engines and people will find hard to index or read a slow page.
Technical Aspects
The first part of technical aspects is, and always was, the URL. In addition to the URL, there are also title tags and meta data that are of importance. Those are all things that describe your website both to search engines and to visitors. Highly relevant URL and title tags can mean a lot for your website, especially if you use keywords. Combining an important keyword with the titles, URL, content and, of course meta data will lead to a high ranking eventually.
You should aim for the URL to be descriptive and relevant, and at the same time short. That can be hard, but there are a few things you should consider before deciding on a domain. For other pages URL can be modified, but it is much harder to modify a domain URL. You can choose one of the three forms of URL.
- Keyword
- Brand
- Business name
Keyword is probably the best option of all, but almost every word in the dictionary is already taken, so that may be difficult. Brand name is something like Digg or Amazon, that is also good but you need to work hard in order to promote a brand name. Business name is for those that already have a store and wish to open a website for their products and clients. This means that you can have both keyword and brand in your URL.
Title tags are also very important. The best idea is to have a keyword in the title, but at the same time to make it full of information. If you are writing about the new iPad, using just that name will get you nowhere. The best example for a good title would be: “iPad – A new gadget from Apple”. Doing that you provide both visitors and search engines with what they need, information.
Meta tags are the last part. Some time ago, meta tags were the only thing we needed in order to make a website rank high. You just needed to stuff your meta tags with keywords and you can place yourself in top rankings. That is not the case now. Actually, it isn’t the case for over 10 years. Although meta tags will not be used to calculate your rankings they are used for description. Most search engines, like Google will use the snippet from your meta description tag and place it under the link. That description may have the biggest influence on someone to click on your link and visit your website.
Every single part mentioned in this article is very important for optimization of your website. We are not living in the 90’s when you could just stuff your meta with keywords and enjoy the number one rank. SEO has become very complicated, but if done properly it will show you its benefits.
The website optimization has some important key points that shouldn’t be overlooked when it comes to the search ranking.