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5 Tips For A
Better Website © 2004
By Tara Grant
Email:
info@designbytara.com
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.
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Tara Grant,
owner of
http://www.designbytara.com and
http://www.wahpnetwork.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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