How to Optimize Your Website

Creating a website that appeals to not only visitors but search engines as well is a challenging task, but critical when trying to generate steady traffic flow. Website optimization is key to transforming your website into an attractive destination that audiences will see. After all, what's the use of creating content if viewers can't find it? In the past, content optimization meant inserting a specific keyword a certain number of times per page. Nowadays, search engines look for relevant information, useful data, and overall quality in terms of writing content. To help understand what this exactly means, I've put together a few basic website optimization techniques to help make your site appeal more to search engines and audiences as well.

1. Include a Meta Title and Meta Description

The title tag communicates the purpose of your web page and it is very important to Search Engines Optimization (SEO). It should essentially summarize your page content and give viewers a good understanding on what to expect. Keep in mind that title tags have been considered to be one of the most important SEO elements being that it appears in three keys places: browsers, search engine results, and external websites. According to Moz's 2013 search engine ranking factors, keeping keywords closer to the start of the title tag could prove to be more helpful in ranking.

Meta descriptions are used by search engines to provide a concise explanation of the contents of a webpage. These short paragraphs give you the opportunity to market content to audiences and let them know exactly what your webpage is about. It's a huge indicator to searchers whether or not the given page contains the information they're looking for- so be sure to use important keywords and an intriguing vocabulary that will attract your audiences attention.

2. Keywords are Key to Website Success

With an average of over 5 billion Google searches a day, you may want to consider a strategic way to place keywords throughout your content. In order for your webpage to preform well with search engines, you want to try and include as many keywords as possible not only on your home page, but throughout your entire site. Instead of focusing on a specific set of words, creating an overall theme may be an attractive approach to your website and search engines as well. This will avoid keyword repetition, and gives viewers a broader vocabulary when reading through your pages' content.

3. Use Image Alt Tags

You may not realize this, but search engines can't actually see your pictures, they can only process a description through image tags better known as alt tags. If you're not familiar with what alt tags are, they provide text information that search engines use to determine the best image to return for a search query. This is extremely important when considering your tag selection because they can help generate traffic to your site from image based search engines such as Google Images for example. With this begin said, alt tags are a great place to utilize keywords as long as the alt attributes are appropriate for the image.

4. Create Valuable Content

Put yourself in your audiences shoes and think about what you would find as useful information. It's important to consider whether or not your content is targeting the right audiences. Too large of an audience may create too much competition, whereas having too small of an audience may not generate enough exposure for your content to be seen. Creating content worth reading is crucial to your webpages success. Audiences are looking for information that's worth their time, so take a few minutes and ask yourself what the purpose of your content is. Whether your goal is to entertain, educate, or persuade audiences - considering the purpose of your web content could create a strong connection between you and your viewers.

Post by Kathleen Borg