Lesson19 - Ideas for a successful websites

Lesson19 - Ideas for a successful websites


How to optimize your website

The significance of having an online presence these days should not be undervalued. Having a website not only helps a business to grow, but lets it thrive in a competitive global market place. The strategic importance of a website can be seen from the fact that at the moment there are over two billion websites on the internet, with this number growing literally every minute. To make sure that your website is a success and is found by those who require your services, you need to optimize your site. Website optimization is an almost guarantee that your site will be found among the plethora of websites that are out there at the moment.


So why should one optimize their website? The answer is simple; if your customers and potential clientele cannot find you online they will most certainly find your competition. This means that your business is bound to fail. If there is one truth about people who shop online it is this; over 85% of online shoppers use search engine results to find whatever they are looking for on the web. This means that if you page is not ranked in the top 20 to 30 search results; it will be hard for your online business to succeed. Even though you may spend large amounts of money to give yourself a web presence that is unique and distinct, but if your customers cannot find you online, they cannot buy from you.

So what exactly is website optimization? Website optimization is the process of designing your web pages to have a high rank in popular search engine results. If you are serious and determined to have an online business then optimizing your web page is the next necessary step. When designing your website, it is essential that you specifically design it to get a higher ranking in search engine results. To do this you need to use; Meta tags, Keywords, Title tags, Image Alt tags, Text and the overall design of a website. All these above mentioned components play a key role in optimizing your website. Though many search engines nowadays are no longer using Meta tags to gain a high page ranking, they are still important and you should include them in your site.

Remember that if your site does not rank in the top 20 search results when conducting a keyword search at say Google, your target audience will in all probability not be able to find you. This is because a significant amount of web traffic is generated from major search engines. So how does one go about optimizing their website? Well the answer is simple just read on below and you will understand what needs to be done.

Keywords and phrases

The first step that you need to take to optimize your site is selecting keywords and phrases that best suit what your site is all about. A keyword best describes what the content of your web page is. For example if your website is about cooking, then the best keyword to use would be ‘cooking’. When drafting the content of your website, always make sure that you concentrate on just a few important keywords and phrases, this is because keyword phrases play a very important role in optimizing you site.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are an HTML code that is found between the < HEAD> and < /HEAD> tags. These tags contain a description of your site and are found in the search engine results when you key in a certain word or phrase. When creating Meta tags, be sure to focus on what your website is specifically all about. Do not generalize. Also make sure that your Meta tags include your most important keywords, so that your customers will know exactly what your website is offering.

Image Alt Tags

An Image Alt tag comes after a website’s graphic address or URL in your HTML code. To fully optimize your graphics and your website make sure that you insert a readable keyword phrase within the Img Alt tags.

Title Tags

The Title tag of your website should always contain the most important keyword phrase of your site. This is because it will aid you in getting higher search engine ranking results. Type your key word phrase in lower and use only the most relevant keyword phrases.

Text

Since your text plays a key role in determining your website’s page ranking, it is thus of vital significance to optimizing your website. Remember that when composing your text for your site it should contain plenty of important key words and phrases used in different ways. Also keep in mind that your keywords and phrases should appear at least three times, but not more than seven times in your text.