Website Optimization - SEONITI Online

Optimizing Your Internal Link Structure

Having a robust link structure is very important for search engine optimization (SEO) as search engine spiders discover pages following your URL’s and index them accordingly. Putting right anchor text on the links not only improves your search rankings but also help visitors guess the content of the landing page. Follow these guidelines to improve your overall link structure:

Put right words that describe the page you are linking to in your anchor text (putting “click here” on the anchor tests will not bring much SEO value as compared to backgammon sets, backgammon games, or backgammon boards for the linked pages, even though they lead visitors to the same destination)
Links must be encoded in plain HTML even if pages are dynamically generated to help search engine spiders understand that the page will be there with the same content next time when a visitor comes looking for it
Put more links to your main pages than the less important ones to increase their placement is search rankings

If you are interested in learning more about this exciting area, Jim Boykin has a nice post on Optimizing Internal Link Structure.

Use Flash and Graphics to Complement the Content Not to Impress Visitors

Unless you have a designing, photography or fashion website, don’t try to impress your visitors with splash pages, heavy graphics or fancy fonts. Use graphics and flash to complement your content and to provide additional functionality, not to grab visitors attention. The designs may look cool to you but visitors definitely won’t be that impressed unless there is something in it for them. They will be bored and will leave your website prematurely without doing what you expected them to do on the site.

Online visitors are always in a hurry and looking for “doing something” or “going somewhere”. You must, therefore, respect their time and provide them the right content at right places instead of wasting efforts on short gimmicks. Web is full of that stuff and visitors have learned to ignore that. I hope, you do not want your visitors to ignore your websites.

Filed Under: Blog, Website Optimization Tagged With: Blog, Onpage Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Web Usability, Website Content

The Philosophy of No Nonsense Websites

Remember – Website optimization is a journey, not a destination. It is like a jigsaw puzzle where you are trying to fix several missing pieces together to make the picture perfect. It is not a quick fix solution. It requires months, even years of efforts to reach levels where you can claim some higher satisfaction rates. And once you are there, you still can’t stop since the world around us is changing so fast including our users’ and technologies who make us succeed.

Like in any life situation, we have to make choices when it comes to developing websites. We leave what is not good for our Websites and pick the best alternatives. At least, this is what we think we are doing. However, while doing so, we have to wear many hats – the hat of a businessman with an eye for profits, the hat of a Web developer with a concern for site development, and most importantly the hat of a visitor with an eye for his concerns.

Most of the times when we are designing Websites, we are wearing the first two hats overlooking visitors’ concerns. We think that we made the right choices for our visitors in the form of content, design and products that our Web sites carry. However the Web is full of garbage and useless Websites. I do not have to prove it. It takes time and effort to find what you are looking for on search engines, despite the fact that they have evolved and are trying to keep the garbage away from your search results. I am talking about aggregate here; your Website may be an exception. But think about the billions out there.

If you start your Web design strategy the right way, beginning with visitors’ perspective, chances are you will be able to build better Websites which will exceed your own expectations. You will be able to provide best products to your customers; will use the right language your visitor will understand or care about, and make him want to come back again. Most of the times we get so engaged and attached to our Web projects that we start to overlook visitors’ issues, even though we have been trained to think about customers first.

It is time that we must start building Websites which are useful and important to our visitors by providing them the right content at right places. By keeping things simple for our users, even if we are using some high-end technologies, we can make them masters of our Website. Once they are confident and become expert users, they will become our loyal customers and keep coming back.

With right content and right customers, our websites will become promising candidates for higher rankings for the relevant search terms. And remember this is a journey, not a destination. The rewards will be enormous if we travel the right path, putting necessary efforts and patience, with no short-sightedness.