Optimizing a website is never easy. But like any other discipline, it can be learned as long as you are dedicated to your profession as a digital marketer.
Website optimization is very important as it is an integral part in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It has been a practice to rank websites in search engines. Optimization can be a long-term task that can result into experimental methods, which would take most of your time. But before reaching that point, there are some basic things that have to be accomplished first.
Choose the best Content Management System (CMS)
Your CMS should be fit to your needs. There is Drupal, Joomla, Shopify, Weebly, Wix, WordPress, and many choices out there. Choose whatever you think is the best and make sure it has user-friendly interface. That unless you have a website developer who can help you with a complicated CMS or even create a customized system for your website.
Clear and mobile-friendly theme
After choosing the right CMS, another thing to mind is choosing the theme. A theme is vital to a website as it dictates its design and overall look. It consists many things such as colors scheme, font types and sizes, and other fundamental things that are considered part the framework. You have to choose a theme that has a clear layout as it defines the identity of your website and helps improve user experience. Remember, search engines wants webmasters give good user experience.
On-Page SEO
This is the part that focuses on the internal structure of a website. It refers to all the things that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its ranking in the search engines. There are a lot of things to mind when doing on-page SEO. But below are the basic ones.
- Website title. The website title should be relevant to the contents in general. Unless it is a brand or business name.
- Header tag. It refers to the header title of a particular page. This has to be set in H1 and should be the only H1 in a single page.
- Title tag. This one refers to the title of a particular page that is intended to be read by search engine bots. This should be followed by the website title with a separator. It is also called the meta title.
- Clear Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Having clear URLs on pages helps the ranking of a website in search engines. Avoid unnecessary words in a URL and make sure everything is related to the content of the landing page. To be safe, the header tag and URL should be the same.
- Meta description. This is the description of a page that is intended to be read by search engine bots. It is the website description you usually see at the search results. This should not be too short but not too long. Maximum of 50 characters will be fine.
- Links. All the links, whether internal or external should be properly set. All search engines will count the links on a website to determine how valuable it is on a particular topic.
- Images. Make sure to add Title and Alt Text to all your images. You can also add captions into it if necessary.
- Keywords. Choose the best keywords. Websites should have at least two keywords per page or a maximum of three. Do not exceed on that count as search engines may treat is as spam.
- Sitemap HTML. Creating a sitemap HTML may not be necessary as long as the website has a neat layout and navigation.
- Sitemap XML. This is the sitemap that speaks to search engine bots. When a bot visits a website, sitemap XML tells the structure of the website and presents the contents.
- Robots.txt – This is a txt file that [also] speaks to the search engine bots. This is the one responsible in guiding and moderating the behavior of the bots by dictating their access and telling them the forbidden pages.
Optimized and original contents
A content should not just be optimized. But also original. This is to avoid a violation of copyright law and to make the website safe from search engine penalties. Remember, duplicate and copied contents can negatively impact a website.
Off-page SEO
This is the technique that complements on-page SEO as it [also] helps a website get a good rank in search results. But this one refers to the links that have been placed outside of the website, which intends to bring users or visitors. In short, this is where link building takes place.
Website security
Securing your website is vital. Aside from protecting a digital asset, you are also protecting the users away from any harmful online activities or malware that could give you a headache. Take note, if your website is malware-infected, your ranking in search engines will go down or will be deindexed as it gives bad user experience.
Submitting to search engines
This may be unnecessary as some search engines automatically crawl a website once it goes online. But if you prefer doing this, you can submit your website to different search engines and create a webmaster account on each of them so you would be able to claim it as your property.
To conclude, above are just basic things to mind in website optimization. After accomplishing those, I suggest you to experiment and find new ways that will help your digital marketing campaigns.