“Optimize your website” is the new charge that small business owners are faced with when refining their marketing strategy. But what does “optimize your website” actually mean? For who? Or what? You can interpret the phrase in many different ways, but the good news is that you’ll rarely be wrong if you focus on the customer experience.
How You Can Optimize Your Website
When given the task of optimizing a website, many designers will focus on the look and feel of the site. Even seemingly inconsequential choices can affect the way a website operates, so from a design perspective, “optimize your website” could mean limiting those design choices – Flash versus HTML5 – for example, that can interfere with the visitor’s Web experience. Navigation is also a design element, so improving the way a visitor moves around the site can be a way to optimize.
For Web programmers, “optimize your website” may have an entirely different meaning. Programming the website to distinguish mobile users from desktop visitors, for example, can make a huge difference in the visitor’s Web experience. It can also mean making sure that website pages load quickly, that the use of plug-ins, special effects, intensive animations, sound files and even advertisements don’t interfere with the user’s expectations. “Optimize your website” could also mean improving the servers on which the website is hosted, improving the Internet connection the server uses or modifying the “back end” programming to improve website or content management. For e-commerce websites, “optimize your website” may mean making programming changes that improve secure access to a payment gateway, or speed up transaction times.
For the SEO expert, “optimize your website” may mean making changes to the text and content of the site or particular pages to help search engines find featured content easily. Appealing to the search engines brings more visitors to the website and helps preserve (or improve) a site’s ranking for particular search terms. “Optimize your website” may also mean improving the “relevance” of a webpage or website in relation to a searcher’s query.
Some changes may amount to little more than tweaks, while others may require significant planning and implementation time. There are many different ways to optimize your website, but if your primary concern is improving the visitor’s experience, anything you do to “optimize your website” will help.
If you would like more information about ways in which you can optimize your website, please contact our Creative Director Dave Ramsell or give Dave a call at (330) 243-0651 to set up a consultation.
Photo Credit: vangelis, via FreeImages.com
