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5 Tips For a Better
Website
By, Tara
Grant
Having an eye catching website is great, but are
you optimizing your website to allow the best performance
possible? I receive several emails a day from clients asking
how they can get more hits to their websites, what can be done
to increase sales, and how to prepare their sites for search
engines. There are very simple things that can be done to help
your website perform its best.
First of all, a websites load time is important
for many reasons. No one wants to site and wait a minute for a
page to show up. Slow loading websites can attribute to lost
sales for your business! Many customers will actually avoid a
website that takes a long time to load. You can keep your
websites load time down drastically but keeping the size 26kb
or smaller. If you are unsure of the size if your site you can
calculate the size of your web page by highlighting the HTML
document, then click on 'File' and 'Properties' and see your
file size. Then repeat same step for each graphic you have on
that page. Add each file size together to get the exact size
of that page. One of the easiest ways to get a faster loading
page is to shrink the images on your website. A GIF graphic
can normally be reduced by around 30-40% without loosing any
sharpness.
A site that contains broken links gives a bad
impression to your visitors and can be a cause of lost
visitors. Aside from the fact that broken links look
unprofessional, some of the major search engines and portals
may not index your page if it has broken links or missing
images. You should check your website once it is complete to
make sure every link is working properly, to avoid a possible
business loss.
Search engines do not index images, so it is a
good idea to always add ALT tags to your images to make sure
the search engines recognize all of the content on your site.
ALT tags that contain keywords can also be used to increase
your keyword frequency and help you achieve better
rankings.
When creating meta tags do NOT repeat the same
key word several times. This is called 'keyword spamming' and
it is disliked by the search engines. Let's say your website
offers gift baskets, use the keyword 1 or two times and that
is it. If your keywords are baby gift basket, hostess gift,
wedding basket, corporate gift basket, holiday gift basket,
you have repeated the keyword gift and basket to many times.
You can minimize your keyword characters by using gift basket,
wedding, gifts, baby, wedding, corporate, and holiday. This
way your website is not considered keyword spamming.
Many designers often separate keywords
with commas. Instead of separating each keyword with a comma,
just separate them using a space. By doing this, it will allow
the search engines to combine your keywords into phrases, for
people who use phrases to search.
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Tara Grant is a warm-hearted entrepeneur. An
avid networker in the WAHM community, Tara's website designs
are reasonably priced and geared toward female entrepeneurs
and small business owners. http://www.designbytara.com/
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