6 Essentials to Optimise Your Website

Website optimisation is the process of using tools and resources to improve the performance and visibility of your website. See, simply building a site isn’t enough to have visitors come running. There are certain standards that your website must meet for search engines like Google to recommend it to their users.

The process of optimisation can be undertaken during the initial development stage or, perhaps more commonly, later on, as business owners become more invested in strategies they can undertake to improve user traffic. Optimisation is more commonly referred to as SEO, or search engine optimisation, and there’s plenty of companies out there that provide SEO services in Australia. A professional team that specialises in search engine optimisation in Melbourne will likely employ any combination of the following tactics to improve the quantity and quality of leads to your site.

Lay the Right Foundations

Website optimisation is made infinitely easier if you start in the right place. While there’s certainly nothing stopping you from optimising an existing site, working with a full services digital company, or at the very least, a development team trained in the basics of SEO while you're building your website means you won’t have to make too many changes later on when you’re looking at implementing optimisation strategies.

Picking the right domain name, web hosting service, and CMS platform are all things you can do to get off on the right foot. Using clean code, installing browser caching, and minimising the use of plugins can also dramatically improve the technical performance of your site and the overall user experience.

Mobile-First Development

A few years ago, Google surprised no one when they announced they would be rolling out a mobile-first SEO algorithm. New websites (and by now, all websites) were crawled and indexed as per the mobile performance of their website. Business owners could no longer get away with hoping visitors would be persistent enough to put up with navigating a desktop site on their tiny smartphone screens.

These days, when building a website, mobile performance simply has to come first, from both a user experience and SEO perspective. Responsive web design has made this not too difficult to achieve but this is again a factor that needs to be considered at the early stages of development.

Consider Page Speed

We are busy and impatient people. We don’t have time to sit waiting for a website to load, even if that website is offering products and services we really need. Most people will simply move to the next suggested result on Google — which is probably your direct competitor.

Page speed is an optimisation factor that can be improved post-development by optimising images, reducing redirects and enabling caching. However, there are certainly strategies that can be incorporated while building a website to improve overall load time. Choosing the right web server, for example, is a critical decision that will significantly impact user experience and SEO results.

Use Keywords — Everywhere

Keywords are often associated with blog posts and articles. While these broader bodies of text should be optimised appropriately, there are many opportunities for you to implement keywords elsewhere on your site.

Keywords can (and should) be incorporated into:

● Meta descriptions
● Title tags
● Image file names and descriptions
● URLs
● Social media

Avoid going too far and engaging in keyword stuffing, which could see you heavily penalised by Google.

Optimise Images

Without images, the internet would be a very boring place indeed. With images, your website is prone to suffering user experience issues, particularly if they are not in the correct format or optimised.

Optimising images is a delicate process because the last thing you want to do is interfere with file quality. If done correctly, you shouldn’t see any degradation but you do want to be careful when picking the file format, compressing, and altering image height and width.

Prioritise Accessibility

First of all, accessibility is important in itself. All people have a right to access information, products, and services online, regardless of any physical, visual, or auditory disability they might have. It’s now an expectation that all web developers and designers will create with accessibility in mind.

Implementing tools like alt text and site maps can also help from an SEO perspective as you will be providing the search engine with added information about the content on your site.

To learn more about how you can build a website to suit all audiences — both real and robotic — speak to a professional team providing search engine optimisation in Melbourne today.