Effective Web Design - How to Keep Your Website At Peak Performance For More Profit

How to Keep Your Website at Peak
Performance for More Profit
by: Robert Zink

1. Broken Links
Broken links quickly turn off your viewer and quickly send them to another website. Broken links help your competition. Search engines will ignore your site, not providing it listing because of broken links. Ouch! Broken links cost money...

2. The Right Colors
Make sure that the colors on your website are displayed properly on other people's browsers. There are only 216 colors you can use with certainty and confidence on the web. These colors work well on older computers and browsers as well as new-state-of-the-art computers.

3. Browser Compatibility
Look at your website through a variety of browsers. Each browser will altar the overall look and feel of the site. Try this site to get a firsthand look: http://www.anybrowser.com.

4. Alt Tags
Alt tags aid you in ranking higher on the search engines by raising keyword density. In addition, alt tags allow you to give an alternative to people who have the "view images" function turned off on their browser.

5. Meta Tags
The most important meta tag is the title tag, the keyword tag, and the description tag. The title tag should be no longer than 64 characters (longer than this and the search engines will cut you off). Never include meta tags that do not appear on the page. Some engines will

punish you for doing that. Never repeat the same keyword! Separate your keywords with a space, not just commas. This enables you to use "phrase" keywords. This is important because people often search by phrases.

6. Load Time
Generally, the accepted maximum time for a page to load is between 15 to 30 seconds.

7. HTML Optimizer
Compressing your HTML code will help your page load faster. HTML optimizers remove all blank spaces in your HTML code. The average reduction in size is about 20%! Make sure that your optimizer is not allowed to compress embedded script tags.

8. HTML Validator
Always check the validity of your HTML. Each search engine is different, and some will punish you with a long ranking to pages that have poor HTML

While there are certainly many other secrets you must employ to build a competitive website, these are the basics and are extremely important.

There is a great deal of planning that goes into the construction of a successful website. This article outlines some of the technical aspects. I would strongly suggest that you subscribe to our email newsletter or check back here often to receive vital information on how to build advertising and marketing input into your website.

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