Creating a website which appeals to all search engines can be really tough and challenging, but if you want your website to gain popularity and generate good traffic. You have to work hard for it & that’s where Website optimization comes into play.
Site optimization is usually defined as a process of improving a website to make it user friendly as well as search engine friendly. In short, optimizing a site means to improve it in order to improve its ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
To survive in the world of online marketing, it is very essential for you to optimize your site. It will be very beneficial for you as optimization helps you to gain popularity, traffic, better ROI, and also speed up the loading time of your webpages. Not only this, well versed optimized sites require less space on servers for storage of data. Apart from this, quick processing of files, lower bandwidth, user friendly, ease of accessing site etc. are some of the reasons why you need to optimize your site.
Few simple steps to optimize a site are-
- Title tags and Meta tags- almost every search engine use Meta Keywords, SEO description and Title tags to index and rank Web pages. In fact, description is often used by many search engines to give a brief overview of a site in search results. So be sure to place a title tag at the top of each page, include appropriate Meta keywords tag.
- Keywords placement- a keyword-rich content is the key part of a successful SEO strategy. So it is very essential to add right keywords in the content of your site. A short Keyword research can help you to identify the right keywords which bring traffic to your site. You can use these keywords in the content of your home page or you can also embed them in the anchor text, domain name, title tags etc. and most importantly, never forget to ensure right keyword density.
- Good quality and up to date content- content plays a vital role in keeping the interest of visitors. Not only this, many search engines assign rankings to the site as per their content-quality. All search engines strive for quality and informative content. So it is very essential to include genuine and good quality content. It’s also very important to keep your Website always updated with fresh content.
- Interlinking and backlinks- interlinking is one of the key factor in optimization. Proper interlinking of content not only saves your space but also make your content easy to be crawled. Not only this, good and high-value backlinks also play important role as analysis of such backlinks provide a measure of determining which pages are good for particular topic.
- Validate your HTML code- Although most of the search engines rely on the basic correctness of the code in indexing of your web pages but still HTML coding of webpage is very important part which is mostly neglected by all of us. An error-prone coding may lead to the partially indexing of your content. The search engine may ignore part of your text, and your web page will not be shown like what it was supposed to be.
- Sitemaps and directories- A Sitemap maps out all the pages of your site through links and hence increases your chances of being crawled by various search engines. Similarly, directories also help in proper indexing of a website.