5 Tips for A Better Website

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 sit 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 losing 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. Two or Three ALT tags every few images are a great way to add additional keywords, as long as you remember not to add more than that. Adding more than a few, can actually be considered keyword spamming and can get your website banned from search engines.

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.

These are very simple things that will help you see a big difference!

The author is associate editor at Bravens Inc., Web Design and Development Company USA