Website optimizing is a process

Website optimizing is a very important website component

Search engine spiders are like prospectors, constantly searching for gold. To a search engine, "gold" is valuable, important TEXT INFORMATION. Information about what? Anything! The world wide web was invented to be the repository of all human knowledge. Every webpage published contributes to that goal. Optimizing your website simply allows everyone to find your business information! How? Search engines collect billions of webpages using their spiders (aka robots), deposit that information in their databases, analyze it with their algorithm and return the page title of the most relevant webpages when someone enquires about a specific topic. That page title becomes the link to your website. Optimizing your website for specific topics, lets search engines place you near or at the top of their search results. Understanding that your business website is not about you, its about important, free information for your visitors. This is the first step toward optimizing your website!

Optimizing a Website is an ongoing process, not a single event

Website optimizing is an ongoing process. Since your website is a living entity in the world of information, your important information will probably change. As your business expands, changes focus or direction, or evolves into different products or services, you will need to add new information pages. Creating sections (folders) for general information topics, allows you to accurately add new information on specific topics. As an example: This page website_optimizing.html is located in a file folder named "search_engine_optimization/" on our web server. Every webpage in this folder is about Search Engine Optimization. Any new, specific webpage optimizing topics that we add to our website will go in this folder. Your website can use the same method. It allows search engines to identify the right folder, right page and specific page title, easily and accurately. Optimizing your website over the long term is much easier when you clearly identify where the topic specific information pages are located on your website. Creating a logical file structure is an important website optimizing technique.

Website optimizing is ONLY about search engines

Search engines don't see your webpages the way your human visitors do. They all read your text information and completely ignore your pictures and presentation effects. The search engine's mission is to find, store and present important, relevant information to their users. Although they each use slightly different methods to accomplish their mission, they all have the same purpose. They don't care what your website looks like, only the text information it contains. Providing important, relevant and topic specific information will impress every search engine. When your web page impresses a search engine, they rank it as a valuable information resource. Impressing search engines is the key to website optimizing and increasing your "new visitor" count.

The Website Optimizing Challenge

Although website optimizing focuses on search engines, the real importance or value of every website is in the way it presents important information to human visitors.

Optimizing your Website Graphics

Optimizing website graphics means keeping your picture files as small as possible, reusing the same pictures on many webpages and avoiding too many pictures on a page. The download time used by pictures can make your pages so large, that visitors get frustrated waiting for the page to load. Not everyone uses a high speed internet connection! Always use descriptive "alt text" for every graphic.

Optimizing page names

The name given to each webpage should describe what the visitor will find on the page. Optimizing page names helps search engines and people decide which pages are important to them.

Optimizing page titles

The page title tells your visitor what the page is about. It also tells search engines the topic of the page. Keep page titles "topic specific" and focused on a specific subject.

Optimizing content

The information on each webpage should focus on the topic described in the page title. If you need to expand into other topics, create more topic specific pages. File sizes should be kept small, to load quickly.

Optimizing headings

Headings (<h1> to <h6>) describe the relative importance of each page section. Your <h1> heading should closely follow the page title topic. The other headings will follow the sub-topics of the same information. NEVER use headings to simply provide font size or color control.

Optimizing navigation

Creating menus and hyperlinks that are easy to understand and follow is important to your visitors. Visitor perspective should be your guide to navigation features. If your visitor gets lost in your website, they will simply leave! When in doubt, always include a good sitemap. Creating a user friendly website is important.

Optimizing Valid Markup

Using the most recent markup language possible and in its strictest form, will make your web pages easy to understand by people, search engines and web browsers. Important meta tags help browsers too. Always validate your webpages.

Optimizing for Accessibility

Creating accessible information pages will allow persons with disabilities to access your website information. Since most websites are not accessible, your website will be in an elite class of small business websites.

Optimizing for Usability

The most important aspect of every website is "Usability." Every visitor should be able to access and navigate your website and find your important information pages. Providing content for different visitor perspectives and at different levels of technical understanding, will make your site widely usable. Declaring " WHO" your information is intended for, will allow your visitors to decide how to look for the information they want. A user friendly website will make your visitors want to come back.

Good links are a big part of website optimizing

Links are what the Web is all about. Links to good business information makes your business website a valuable resource. Optimizing a business website requires a good link building strategy.

Optimizing your Domain Name

The domain name you choose should "describe" who you are, what you do, where you do business, or any combination of these in words that could be used in a search query. Using ourcompany.com could be a huge financial mistake. We chose seowebsitesdesigners.com for some very good reasons!

These important optimizing components are covered in our Websites Services Policy

• See also: Do it yourself optimizing   and Search engine optimized website
• and Questions (FAQ) about Search Engine Optimizing

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