Website optimizing is a process

Business website optimizing is an important decision

How to find a good website optimizer

Optimizing a website for your customers is always a win—win!

Optimizing means getting user friendly

Every website, like every business, has a unique personality. A website can say to a potential customer that you're friendly, approachable and safe to deal with. You have the answers to their questions and that you provide good customer service. All this and more, can be instantly conveyed to potential customers on a company web site. That is what branding and creating brand loyalty is all about. On the web, you can create information loyalty. Sadly, most business websites tell visitors:

Our beautiful website, cost us a lot of money just to say... buy now... (or go away!)

And they do go away, and don't return. Not the first impression you want to convey, if you want to have a successful business website? Is the only important information about the company on your company's business cards? So why is this business mistake so common? It's easy to explain why websites fail to find any new customers. A business owner will find a web designer to design a beautiful website. They let them find a web hosting service, put all the product pictures on web pages, set up a shopping cart system, so the owner can just sit back and wait for the money to roll in. When nobody comes to their website, they can't understand what went wrong! What most business owners don't understand is, a website is not advertising. It's the most powerful marketing tool imaginable, when you know how to use it. When you create a user friendly site, the information customers want is on the website waiting for them. That is simply what a good website does, it waits. This is the most important part of the optimizing process. Then, new customers simply have to find the web site and that is the second part of the process for optimizing a website.

How do customers find our website?

Customers know how to use a search engine. Search engine spiders are like prospectors, constantly searching the web for gold. To a search engine, gold is THE BEST INFORMATION. Information about what? Everything! The world wide web was invented to be the repository of all human knowledge. Every web page published contributes to that goal. Optimizing your website simply allows everyone to easily find your business information online. How? Search engines collect billions of web pages using their spiders (aka robots), deposit the information in their database, analyze it with their algorithm and return a list of page titles of the most relevant web pages when someone enquires about that topic. The page title becomes the link to your website. Providing the the best information, helps search engines place your site near or at the top of their search results listing. Understanding that your website is NOT ABOUT YOU, its about free information for potential customers, is often the biggest optimizing challenge. Good websites always have good answers to customer questions.

[Content]

Optimizing a Website is a process, not a single event

Website optimizing is an ongoing process. Since your web site is a living entity in the world of information, your important business information will probably change often. 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 web folder named /search_engine_optimization/ on our web server. Every web page in this folder is about Search Engine Optimization. Any new, specific optimizing information web pages that we add to our web site will go in this folder. Your website can use the same method. It allows search engines to identify the right folder, the 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.

Why optimizing is (mostly) about search engines

Search engines don't see your web pages the way human visitors do. They can only read text information. They completely ignore pictures and presentation effects. A search engine's mission is to find, retrieve, store and present important, relevant information to their users. Although each search engine uses slightly different methods to accomplish their mission, they all have the same purpose. They don't care what your website looks like, only the unique text information web pages it contains. Providing important, relevant and topic specific information will impress every search engine. When a web page impresses a search engine, they rank it as a valuable information resource, so impressing search engines is the key to web site 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 quality 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 web page 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 web page 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 a good menu 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 web site, they will simply leave! When in doubt, always include a good sitemap. Creating a user friendly website is important.

[Content]

Optimizing page markup

Using the most recent web page 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 web pages.

Optimizing for Accessibility

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

Optimizing for Usability

The most important aspect of every website is "Usability." Every visitor should be able to access and navigate your site 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 information makes your business web site a valuable resource. Optimizing a business web site also 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 customer 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 also explained in our Customer service guarantee

Want to find a link to a good optimizer?

Should you find our optimizing information useful and wish to link directly to this web page, simply copy and paste the following link text onto any of your site's pages:

<a href="http://www.seowebsitesdesigners.com/search_engine_optimization/website_optimizing.html">Why website optimizing?</a>

---

[Content]

l Home (h) l A Good Sitemap l A Good Menu (i) Find an optimizer Ph: 604-540-9231