Planning your website project is complete. You know its purpose, goals, and content. Now, you need to focus on ensuring its successful launch on the World Wide Web. This will always raise key questions about optimizing it to function as competitively as possible to accomplish your objectives.
Below is a list of commonly asked questions regarding website optimization services and the different solutions that will help your next project move forward efficiently.
What is website optimization?
Website optimization is a series of planned actions to improve your website’s performance. The goals may vary depending on what you hope to achieve. Most businesses want to attract an audience interested in their products and services.
However, while gaining a lot of visitors might look good in a report, the lack of interest in the site itself won’t help generate those important leads. There will also be the issues of an increasing bounce rate, a drop in engaged sessions, and a slowing down in conversion events. Combining these will do more harm than good to your website.
The right optimization improvements and SEO strategy should increase lead-rich traffic, a positive user experience, and growing conversions. Website optimization creates a strategy using tools and known techniques to help improve how leading search engines rank and view your website. These currently include Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.
What are some common areas of website optimization?
Some common areas of website optimization include improving website speed, optimizing images, reducing server response time, compressing files, optimizing CSS and JavaScript, and using a content delivery network (CDN).
What is website speed, and why is it important?
Website speed refers to how quickly a website loads. It is important because users need more patience for slow-loading websites and may leave if a page takes too long. It’s one of the core values Google uses to rank websites and is an area of improvement. All websites should strive to maintain the Google Core Values listed below.
Google Core Values
- Provide the best user experience possible
- Make your site interesting and useful
- Know what your readers want
- Prioritize fast load speeds
- Avoid distracting advertisements
- Build authority and trust with organic user links and interactions
- Make your website mobile-friendly
- Be careful who you link to and the links you use
- Promote your website
How can I test the performance of my website?
You can test the performance of your website using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom, and YSlow. These tools will provide you with a report that includes information on website speed, performance, and areas for improvement. The information provided will outline suggestions for improving your website’s performance. Be prepared to consult with a developer to determine the best course of action.
Why should I optimize my website?
Optimizing your website is an essential task that all business owners must consider. With billions of searches being conducted on Google every year, it’s imperative your customers can find you. This means fine-tuning your website to rank for keywords your customers use to find your company’s products and services.
As technology continues to evolve, optimization tactics and techniques do, too. You will need to stay up-to-date and ready to move with the times. When researching the best way to optimize your website, search engine optimization (SEO) is a term you will often hear.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of fine-tuning websites to perform well by following the guidelines set out by search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Creating easy-to-read, informative content and following the rules established by those businesses aims to increase your website’s visibility to the people searching for products or services related to your business. This means improving ranking and authority for those keywords or phrases people use to find your website.
What is a keyword?
Keywords are the search queries that users type into search engines to find the information they need to complete a particular action or find more information on a specific topic. There are different keywords, some short and vague (cars for sale) while others are longer and much more specific (used cars for sale under $1K). Regardless of length, all terms used in a search engine are considered a keyword.
If someone wants to answer a long and challenging question, that term would still be considered a keyword and something your website could rank for. For example, House of the Dragon was a popular keyword in 2022 and associated with several searches, including those linked to finding out about the story, cast, and setting.
HOTD (the show’s abbreviated name) functions similarly and produces similar results. Adding more information to the keyword string can make it more specific, narrowing the search by writing House of the Dragon characters. This term is still considered a keyword, but one that looks to cover a very specific topic has fewer people looking for it and is easier to rank as fewer websites have chosen to target it.
Why are keywords important?
Search engines have spent years perfecting their systems so users find the correct answers and web pages that fulfill their needs. Ranking near the top of Google for the keywords most important to your business will bring much quality traffic and will always be the primary goal of any SEO project, however small or large.
How will search engine optimization affect my website?
SEO is the next step after completing a website rebuild or launching new pages. It’s taking that new machine built for a general task and tuning it to perform the most efficiently for what you need. It can be a long process, but the goal will always be to generate better leads and more substantial results for your business’s products and services.
Who can help me on my website optimization journey?
We can! As a website development agency with over 20 years of experience, we have the skills to guide you through the website rebuild process. We can also improve keyword rankings on search engines like Google and Bing. Contact us to learn more about our process and website optimization services.
Photo Credit: Envato Elements
