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Category: SEO

Website Development Checklist

To make sure you don’t miss anything and do work on time, grab this checklist: You should always keep in mind that website development project doesn’t start with coding and doesn’t end after the day you finally launch your website. The phase of preparation affects all subsequent stages, defining how productive the development process will be. A profound and deep discovery of such aspects like age, sex, and interests of your end-user may become the key to success. The post-launch period is rather significant. Your project should be agile and flexible enough to have a possibility to change your website according to users’ feedback or spirit of the time. Keeping in mind that there’s no such thing as insignificant website development phase will prevent you from unexpected troubles and give you confidence that everything flows as it should, and you have full control over the project.

website-development-checklist


How important is a fast loading Website

Did you know that the 14 top mobile retail sites in the industry average only a 4.73 second response time? Not only that but Amazon leads them all with a response time of just 2.85 seconds! OK, your website response time might not ever rival Amazon’s but there are a few tricks you can learn for accelerating your website speed.

MAKING A GOOD FIRST IMPRESSION

It’s a proven fact that your website speed is the very first impression that you make when a consumer visits your site. In fact, 40 percent of visitors could end up simply abandoning your website if it takes too long to load. You should be aiming for a three-to-five second load time to keep them from letting their fingers do the walking and just walk away. To where? Well, probably right on over to your competitor’s site.

END VISITOR FRUSTRATION

There’s really nothing that can frustrate and even infuriate a visitor to your site like slow speed. It’s not just bad for your visitors but very bad for you as a website owner as well. These days, websites are used not only for doing online business but also for sharing useful information with the rest of the world. Whether you’re a retail website owner, a service provider, a photographer showcasing your work, an artist striving to get your voice heard by others, a teacher or provider of DIY tutorials wanting to share your knowledge, or even a stay-at-home mom starting a blog, it’s seriously important that you have an effective website. And, one of the main factors needed for making any website effective is, of course, speed.

MAKE SPEED A TOP PRIORITY

Let’s face it, the speed of your website can literally make or break it. Speed affects not only your traffic, but also your conversions, page views, sales, and your entire reputation. When you make it faster, you’re improving your business and helping it grow. In fact, recent studies show that a whopping 47 percent of users are actually expecting websites to load in two seconds or less. That’s even faster than Amazon! That’s exactly why website speeds play such an important role in the success of your online business and needs to become a top priority if your goal is standing out from your competition. Speeding it up will not only bring positive results when it comes to your conversions and page views, but you’ll also be providing a much better user experience for your visitors. And, the bottom line is that happy visitors become returning visitors.

SLOW SITES KILL CONVERSIONS

Everybody in business knows that you can’t build your brand and a solid customer base without conversions. And, the sad fact is that a slow website can kill those conversions. Not only do you not get effective SEO via better rankings but you build up a gang of visitors who are angry, dissatisfied, and ultimately only good customers for your competition. Don’t help your competition by having slow loading pages when theres are surely going to be faster. The big names in business have already found out how important speed is for their sites. Shouldn’t you do so, too?

For example:

~ Both retail giants Amazon and Walmart have actually reported a one percent revenue loss from just 100ms of site loading delays.
~ Walmart saw a two percent increase in conversions for every one second improvement in load time.
~ Mozilla reported a 2.2 second page speed increase from speeding up its page load.
~ Recent download figures for Firefox went up by 15.4 percent, which equals $10 million a year.
~ Shopzilla reported a 50 percent operational budget reduction by diminishing the load time of its website pages.

LOAD SPEEDS AFFECT YOUR SEARCH RANK

Do you know how important your site speed is for your SEO? Websites that load quickly, get a higher search engine ranking. That’s is because Google actually tends to prefer faster websites. It prefers them so much that it rewards the fast ones with a higher ranking in the search engine results. In addition, user experiences are another factor included in the ranking algorithm at Google. Therefore, when you boost your website speed and improve the user experience, you’ll eventually be improving your SEO ranking.

This results in higher traffic and attracting a great deal more in the area of quality leads. Those leads can convert to visitors and then to customers. You can expect to increase your overall sales exponentially, generate more revenue, and increase your bottom line.

HTTP REQUESTS

Your website could be slow due to an over-abundance of HTTP requests. When a user visits your site, they’ll be requesting certain files by having their web browser request the specific files from your server via the HTTP protocol. Those files can include CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. If you have too many of them, there will be a great number of HTTP requests causing your website to slow down. That’s the reason for minimizing HTTP requests by combining the CSS, HTML, and JS scripts, using CSS in place of images (if possible), reducing the number of elements per web page, installing a cache plugin and reducing redirects that are responsible for creating more HTTP requests and increasing the page load time.

SPEED UP TODAY!

If you’re ready for seriously optimizing your website speeds, automatically minifying, compressing and caching your static data (including CSS, HTML, Images, and Javascript), then why not try Togglebox Web Accelerator? It’s not just FREE but requires no setup so you can spend your valuable time focusing on the development of your website. Why waste a ton of time working through lengthy service configuration when you can do it hands-free by turning it on? And, your newly accelerated website will be not only faster loading but also secured via Let’s Encrypt SSL. So, find out how much more effective your site can be when your images, scripts, and web pages become automatically compressed, optimized, and distributed worldwide. Get your accelerated cloud today!

Your SEO Checklist: 4 Steps to Optimizing Your Website

SEO and online marketing expert Jon Rognerud shows you how to build a high-performance website and get top ranking on all search engines. In this edited excerpt, the author outlines a broad strategy for successfully optimizing your website.

The goal of search engine optimization is to have the search engine spiders not only find your site and pages but also specifically rank the page relevance so that it appears at the top of the search engine results. The process of optimization is not a one-time process but requires maintenance, tuning, and continuous testing and monitoring.

Below is a broad four-step process for a strategy for search engine optimization. Use this as your top-level checklist.

Step 1: Target Market Business Analysis

  • Website analysis. Analysis of meta sets/keywords, visible text and code to deter­mine how well you’re positioned for search engines. For example, how much code do you have on a page compared to text?
     
  • Competitive analysis. Examination of content keywords and present engine rank­ings of competitive websites to determine an effective engine positioning strategy. Pick the top five results in the Google listing results to begin this process. Expand as necessary. Use tools such as Semrush.com and Keywordspy.com.
     
  • Initial keyword nomination. Development of a prioritized list of targeted search terms related to your customer base and market segment. Begin with this: What would you type into a search engine to find your business website or page? Then, ask your customers!

Step 2: Keyword Research and Development

  • Keyword analysis. From nomination, further identify a targeted list of key­words and phrases. Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. Use your preliminary list to determine an indicative number of recent search engine queries and how many websites are competing for each key­word. Prioritize keywords and phrases, plurals, singulars and misspellings. (If search users commonly misspell a keyword, you should identify and use it). Please note that Google will try to correct the term when searching, so use this with care.
     
  • Baseline ranking assessment. You need to understand where you are now in order to accurately assess your future rankings. Keep a simple Excel sheet to start the process. Check weekly to begin. As you get more comfortable, check every 30 to 45 days. You should see improvements in website traffic, a key indicator of progress for your keywords. Some optimizers will say that rankings are dead. Yes, traffic and conversions are more important, but we use rankings as an indicator.
  • Goals and Objectives. Clearly define your objectives in advance so you can truly measure your ROI from any programs you implement. Start simple, but don’t skip this step. Example: You may decide to increase website traffic from a current baseline of 100 visitors a day to 200 visitors over the next 30 days. Or you may want to improve your current conversion rate of one percent to two in a specified period. You may begin with top-level, aggregate numbers, but you must drill down into specific pages that can improve products, services, and business sales.

Step 3: Content Optimization and Submission

  • Create page titles. Keyword-based titles help establish page theme and direction for your keywords.
     
  • Create meta tags. Meta description tags can influence click-throughs but aren’t directly used for rankings. (Google doesn’t use the keywords tag any­more.)
     
  • Place strategic search phrases on pages. Integrate selected keywords into your website source code and existing content on designated pages. Make sure to apply a sug­gested guideline of one to three keywords/phrases per content page and add more pages to complete the list. Ensure that related words are used as a natural inclu­sion of your keywords. It helps the search engines quickly determine what the page is about. A natural approach to this works best. In the past, 100 to 300 words on a page was recommended. Many tests show that pages with 800 to 2,000 words can outperform shorter ones. In the end, the users, the marketplace, content and links will determine the popularity and ranking numbers.
     
  • Develop new sitemaps for Google and Bing. Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Create both XML and HTML versions. An HTML version is the first step. XML sitemaps can easily be submitted via Google and Bing webmaster tools.
     
  • Submit website to directories (limited use). Professional search marketers don’t sub­mit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. A better and faster way is to get links back to your site naturally. Links get your site indexed by the search engines. However, you should submit your URL to directories such as Yahoo! (paid), Business.com (paid) and DMOZ (free). Some may choose to include AdSense (google.com/adsense) scripts on a new site to get their Google Media bot to visit. It will likely get your pages indexed quickly.

Step 4: Continuous Testing and Measuring

  • Test and measure. Analyze search engine rankings and web traffic to determine the effectiveness of the programs you’ve implemented, including assessment of individual keyword performance. Test the results of changes, and keep changes tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you’re comfortable with.
     
  • Maintenance. Ongoing addition and modification of keywords and website con­tent are necessary to continually improve search engine rankings so growth doesn’t stall or decline from neglect. You also want to review your link strategy and ensure that your inbound and outbound links are relevant to your business. A blog can provide you the necessary structure and ease of content addition that you need. Your hosting company can typically help you with the setup/installation of a blog.