Popularity, visibility, traffic, are important characteristics that a web site must have in order to be successful. I will talk about things that you can do to improve your website. Please take into account that this is for general purpose and that in most cases they work, but depending on the context, you might find it useful to follow other paths.
A very helpful tool you can use to know who visits your website and give you important usage statistis is
google analytics. You can follow the instructions on this page to have google analytics on your web site:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1086338?hl=en&ref_topic=1726910&rd=1
Now that you have this tool, I will present you two major aspects and the important recommendations you must follow during the Search Engine Optimization process:
1) Code
Search engines are indexing web sites. They work on understanding what's the page about, and then they can categorize and assign search keywords to decide when to show up the page. But remember that search engines are reading the html code, so if it's not structured in a good way, it will be very difficult for the search engine to index and categorize the pages. The starting advise on this is to set metakeywords and metadescription according to the page content, try to catch the big picture in a few words, this is a marketing endeavor, but devs should be aware of having this done for every important page on the website. Another recommendations are:
- Having friendly URLs. The first thing used to index a web page is the URL. So it's important to keep them readable and understandable. For example it is much better to have foo.com/colors/grey, than to have foo.com?default.html?category=12&item=15. Can you do some interesting indexing with the second url? Guess what, search engines cannot do it either. There are many tools that depend on the code / technology used for creating the page, that can help in having friendly urls.
- Title is important. I'm referring to the <title> html tag. This is the second thing that the search engines use for indexing the page. What does the title says about the content of the page? It is important to have this in mind when you're setting it.
- Content should start in the first lines of the html. This means that the content specific of the page should be easy reachable by the search engines in the first lines of the html. If you put a lot of non content related code, search engines will fail to do a correct indexation of your page and it would be hard for your page to be reachable even if someone is searching for something specific to your website.
- Optimized static content. Images, css and javascript are static content that should be optimized, in the case of the images, this means, that they should have a decent size, a helpful tool to accomplish this is yahoo image optimizer or irfan view, this last one has a way to do a batch compression of a set of images, this is very helpful, because you can reduce the size of a complete directory quickly. Talking about css, it is recommended to have all the css in one or two documents at most, it's not recommended to use inline css and in order for the browser to load the page quickly, it's a good idea to use a css minifier like css compressor, css should be somewhere in the <head> tag to make it easy to read for the browser. Talking about javascript, it's a good idea to have it in one separate file, it's not recommended to use inline javascript and it should be placed near the end of the html in order for the browser to load the page quickly.
2) Marketing
I will not give a full detail of why marketing is so important and the things you can do to improve it, because this blog is about software development and the technical -develoment- side of it. Anyway, there are some things that I would like to mention.
- Be aware of the analytics concerns on the website. In order to obtain useful data from analytics, the marketing department should decide what things apply for the website. For example URLs need to provide useful data. For example, let's say that you're a company that sells hotel reservations and that you need to know how many reservations are made per month for each hotel company, and that you're not that interested in knowing the place. In this case, the url confirmation of the hotel reservations, can be created having this format: hotels.com/Confirmation/HotelCompany/Place/.. and then, in google analytics, you can see how many confirmations were made to an specific hotel company by checking the visits made to this url: hotels.com/Contirmation/HotelCompany. If you were to do it the other way around: hotels.com/Confirmation/Place/HotelCompany, it would be hard to obtain the decided data, you'll need to check all the visits made for each place to the hotel company you're looking for. Another important thing to define is when you want to track URL clicks from your website, this are concerns that the marketing team needs to establish and make them clear to the developers in order to get useful data from analytics. If you want to know more about URL structure, check this post.
- Get insights from analytics. Once the website is launched, it's a good idea to keep track of the visited pages and the flow of the customers through your website, in this way, you can have useful statistics for knowing things like, which products are being successful, which sections of the website are used (for example, if you have a comment section, it is helpless if it's not in use), and so on, this can help you decide on future campaigns and see were you need to make investment.
- Targeting more than one country. Some people doesn't know that having different websites (even in the same language) but that target different Countries, need some special considerations. For example, if you're using the same top level domain for both websites (for example storeforusa.com and storeforcanada.com) and you have pages with the almost the same content (for example the page of a product) then, when you search in google, you'll find results from both websites! this is because .com is considered "international" for google. You can change this behavior by using a different top level domain, it would be better to have something like: store.com.us and store.com.ca. And apply some configuration changes in google analytics. For further and more specific information, please visit this google documentation page.
A final advise is to use tools that can help you know which aspects of the code can be improved. I find them very helpful, you can read the results and take action to improve the code, they give information about loading time, css, image improvents and so on:
There are many benefits of having a well optimized website. If you want to check them, please follow
this link. I hope you enjoyed this entry!
