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By Tara Grant
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 site 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 loosing
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.
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!
This article may be republished with
the resources box included.
Tara Grant, owner of
http://www.designbytara.com.
Tara is a mom of two
small children and a warm-hearted entrepreneur. An
avid networker in the WAHM community, Tara's website
designs and promotion packages are reasonably priced
and geared toward female entrepreneurs and small
businesses.
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