Types of website optimization:
- Search engine ranking
- User experience
- Lead conversions
- Customer acquisitions
- Customer delight
Search engine optimization is a big part of website optimization, but it’s only one part, not all of it. Optimizing your website for search engine so it ranks at the top of a search engine result page is a milestone of your marketing success. Your ultimate goal is to attract customers, end users, and increase conversions. Search engines are the same. They work for end users, readers, buyers, and consumers. If your customers like your products or services, and they are happy with your website, search engines will rank it high. There’s no trick, no shortcut. Provide high quality services, serve good products, and create an attractive website that best represent and promote your business.
Best practices for website optimization:
- Set a goal for what you’d like to accomplish with your website – increase brand awareness, increase sales, increase audience engagement, etc. Each goal would have impact on the design, structure, and content of your website.
- Optimize websites for searchers (people) and search engines.
Searchers are people. When somebody goes on Internet and a search engine page such as Google and Bing!, they have a purpose. They want information. Search engines have a purpose too – they want to answer these people’s questions and return the results they are looking for. If your products, services, and your website match the searcher’s criteria, you serve both the people and the search engines. If your website shows up in the search engine result pages, the user becomes your potential customer. Search engines crawl web page content to understand the purpose of the websites and the users, and they use programs,
algorithms, and raters to try to feed the searchers with results that best match their inquiries. However, if your website is optimized to match the potential search keywords or strings, it will help search engine understand thus index your web pages quicker and with higher ranks. - Optimization on design
- Great cognitive fluency
- Simple navigation
- Relevant color scheme
- Streamlined next steps readily available
- Invest on high quality content and graphics
- Relevant content based on users intent from search query
- Relevant content to topic of search query.
- Provides value to searchers
- High quality writing and photos
- On-Page SEO
Take good care of the following areas of your website: page title, URLs, page headers, content body, meta descriptions. Make sure they are not blank and updated with the most relevant and readable content. - Just the right amount of social media integration
No excessive social media sharing please. Too many “Share” and “Like” buttons that link to external web pages not only distracts readers, but also takes them away from your website, and sometimes away from your business. However, it is good to choose 1-3 social media platforms that are relevant to your business, keep them updated, and integrate them seamlessly in your website. - Make your website dynamic, not static.
Update your website regularly. Try to keep it up-to-date with the happenings of your business. Operating hours, contact info, prices, product information, new services, staff / personnel, events, photos, copyright statements, etc. - Make your website mobile friendly and responsive.
For details about mobile friendly and responsive websites, please read this post.
