What is an optimized website?
Optimizing a website basically comes down to getting the best performance and use from your sites code & design, whether it be in the load time of your pages, the number of database queries, properly sized images or techniques that are beneficial for search engine indexing and rankings. These are known as Code Optimization and Search Engine Optimization. There is also a third area which could be called User Optimization, which falls along the lines of your sites' usability for your visitors. We cover these areas in more detail in other areas, but here we'll give a brief overview of each.
Your sites code optimization
Everyone hates to visit a site that takes forever to load or doesn't act the way it should. Often times, the performance of a web page, whether it is in the code or loading of huge images or for any other reason, is enough to make your visitors leave pretty quickly. We've all been to web sites that have done this exact thing. Not only can a poorly performing site from a visitors point of view be bad for business, it can cause the server its hosted on to run inefficiently, and many times your site will run over on bandwidth, temporarily shutting your site down.
Whether you build a site yourself or have someone do it for you, you'll want to ensure that your pages load quickly and display properly. A good developer should keep this in mind when building a website, and you shouldn't be afraid about reminding them once in awhile about it; after all, if you're putting together an ecommerce website that doesn't perform well, you may lose potential sales and potential customers.
Your sites search engine optimization
Search Engine Optimization covers several areas. Our focus here is mainly on onsite optimization, which should be implemented from the start of your sites development. Many premade scripts already utilize the basics on onsite SEO, but for a new web site these areas must be added during the development of the site. In essence, onsite SEO is the usage of basic HTML tags and additional information within your page coding that search engines will notice, creating a better opportunity for your pages to rank higher in online searches. These techniques are very easy to put in place and can reap huge benefits when applied correctly.
Search engines use what are known as spiders or crawlers; these spiders are programs that "crawl" the internet, looking for new web sites, new pages, and new information. When found, the spiders will read the content of the pages, get a feel for what the page is about, and then index the pages as well as determine how rankable the pages are. The spiders can notice the onsite optimization within the page, and this helps them determine how the page would rank in an online search.
Although SEO is not important for code optimization, the opposite is true; if your code is badly written, cluttered, bloated or outdated, spiders may not be able to crawl much of your page to read your content, therefore you won't get much in return for search rankings. You need to ensure that your code is properly written for any onsite SEO to really be effective.
Your sites user optimization
Website usability is a big factor in how well people interact with your web site, how well they understand it, and how much they want to use it. If you have navigation menus that are confusing, if your sites message isn't clear, or if your site doesn't display correctly in all browsers, you don't have good usability and may lose visitors because of it. Along those lines, you may want to think of User Optimization, which we describe as making your site not only user friendly, but user efficient.
If you want to let visitors contact you, a page with a contact form is a great idea. However, if your form has too many fields for the user to enter or asks for information that you don't really need, it isn't efficient from the users point of view. By cutting your form down to the bare essentials, people are more willing to use it. The idea is that, whenever you want to initiate user interaction, make it as simple as possible. Look at your site from the visitors/users point of view, what works for them, what they are willing to do to be part of your site.
Or let's say you want to offer downloads on your website. For the user, the goal is to get from "Download this ebook" to the actual download in as few steps as possible, with as little hassle as possible. If you make the user read pages of agreements and terms and view advertisements and generally jump through hoops to get from point "A" to point "B", many will simply quit somewhere in the middle, because for the user the whole process has simply become a hassle. Granted, it's your website, but if the site isn't enjoyable for your users, the methods you want to use just won't keep people around.