Starting With Web-Site Optimization - Hosting, Domain Names, Navigation, Sitemaps

Web-site optimization is creating a website that will be discovered by search engines and of course search

directories. Not all the aspects of correct optimization are keywords, links, meta tags. There are much more elements to optimize for successful optimization.

It is very important where you host your site. The most important element is the website speed. The slower and cheaper host will make yur site open very slowly and that causes a bad browsing experience for your visitors. A slow website causes visitors to leave your site. If your site takes a few seconds to open a page even Google can apply SEO penalty and decrease your ranking in search results.

For the fastest speed, we usually use carefully optimized Drupal installations, where we achieve a page speed of less than a second. 

That is why we recommend the best hosting to our clients. At the same time, it is important that a host has the latest features. Some hosts have outdated technology and that can cause problems with your website. 

It is also preferable that you host your website where most of your traffic comes from. For example, if your domain host is in England and you have a website for the American population it is better you get a USA host. That will speed up your site.

Another important factor is how long is domain registered. Usually, spammers and hackers purchase the domain for 1 year and in that period of time, that domain s usually removed from the search engine index, and their site is shut down. So search engines give more priority to domains that are registered for a longer time. A domain that was bought and used for over 10 years has a much better ranking chance than the new domain bought 1 month ago.

Also, try to purchase the domain for a few years instead of only for 1 year. That shows search engines that you are serious with your website and are not a spammer that knows his site will be banned in a few months.

Usually, people choose their domain related to their business or their name. So the question is, will the name affect the site SEO?

Big companies with a lot of money strive to have the best domain. For example, casino.com, Business.com, and Health.com were the domains sold for a few million dollars.

So why are these companies paying so much for the domains? When you search for a term or keyword, usually you can find the site with the same term in the domain in the top 5 results.

For example, searching for SEO AND WEB DESIGN will result in displaying my site seoandwebdesign.com.

So If you can, and if the domain is available, try to purchase a domain that has the same keyword that you want your site to rank for. The major domain with popular keywords is all taken these days. Google claims that keywords in the domain are not important for ranking, but we can still see that many exact keyword domains ranks first for that specific keyword. 

So if you are selling Natural Herbs, try to register your domain as naturalherbs.com.

Using a domain name containing a keyword from your content usually improves your site ranking even though Google claims that is not the truth. Lately, it is very hard to buy a domain with keywords in it. Everything is bought by domain shark companies that sit on domains for years and put ridiculous price tags on those domains. 

Still good domains will help you rank well

Few more tips on buying a domain

Purchase the domain name as short as possible. Too many words or characters will result in more misspellings, people might have problem remembering your name.

Don’t use dashes in the domain name, underscores, and other characters. If the domain you want to register is taken, don’t just add some meaningless character of a number. Try to find another word that is relevant and has one or more of the keywords you will be optimizing your site for.

Choose the .com domain, there are many domains to choose from like info, biz, us, tv, names, jobs, eu, ca, de. The .com domain is always the best choice.

The .com are the best domain to choose because they are easily memorable and they achive a better ranking than other domain. For example, duty.com will achieve a better ranking than duty.info, of course, if the other factors are the same (links, meta tags, onsite optimization……..).

But if you can not find the wanted and optimal domain, still the optimal optimization will prevail. The domain is not the most important factor of the website. Remember that.

Website Usability is another crucial aspect. It is also one of the top user requirements.

When users come to your site from search results, they want to find what they’re looking for, navigate from place to place, and be able to load pages quickly, without any difficulties.

Web users are very impatient. They don’t like to search long or wait for a page to open up.

So usability means how the user navigates through and uses your website. And yes, usability has a great impact on SEO.

Usability si very important also for search bots. When a bot comes and crawls your site it checks all the page elements, links, meta tags, HTML code, and links. And sometimes some websites are poorly built with messed-up code. And a search bot just gives up. Because of the frame, flash inside the code, bots can not read the site HTML code. 

So that is a huge loss for your rankings. These days using CMS will fix that because the code with Drupal or WordPress installations should not have any problems by default. Only if you code your site yourself and use outdated techniques, the problems might happen.

Web-site navigation consists of internal navigation and external navigation. Internal navigation includes the internal links that move users from one page to another on your site. External navigation includes links that point to external sites. For your navigation to be SEO-friendly, you have to use both types of navigation carefully.

Check the popular competition sites. How are those sites' navigation structured? Most of those sites use the simple top or left side navigation. They use usually simple text, or button navigation design.

The navigation for most of the sites looks the same because it works. Having text-based navigation on the left side works perfectly for SEO because you can use anchor tags filled with appropriate keywords, that you target on through the site.

The other important element that almost every site uses are text-based links in the content of the page. Those links are usually anchored tags with appropriate keywords.

This is an effective strategy to gain website ranking. The search engine crawler visits your site, checks the linking system, and content of the page, and compares them together. If it finds that the links are relevant to the content, which is relevant to the keywords, it determines your ranking. Every element of the site works together in harmony.

It is crucial to design a navigational structure that is friendly for your users and crawlers that the same time. Return visits from users and high rankings are the ultimate goal. You would need to test several navigation designs to determine which one is the best for your site.

Usability considerations

Sometimes it is not possible to satisfy users and crawlers at the same time. The needs of users are more important because when you get them you want them to return to your site often. As I have stated before users can be very impatient and as soon as they get bored they will leave your website.

So it is important to make a first-time visitor a frequent visitor to your site.

Returning visits can make or break your site.

The goal is that in order to build returning visitors, you have to build new visitors, which is the purpose of SEO. So search engines need to take notice of your site.

When the user preferences are in conflict with crawlers' preferences there is one solution called sitemap.

There are two types of sitemap. A basic simple site map is an overview designed especially for user simple navigation. It’s usually text-based, and it includes links to all of the pages on your website. Crawlers love site maps. You should, too.

Sitemaps can be made automatically if you have a popular CMS site like Joomla, WordPress or Drupal. If you are hand-coding your site you would have to create it manually. You can structure sitemap links at different levels. All the text links should include keywords that you are using.

When a site map exists on your web page, a search engine crawler can locate it and then crawl all of the pages that are linked from it. Whether they appear on search engine results depends upon how well the SEO is done for each individual page.

The second type of site map is called an XML site map. It lists all of the URLs for a website. This file is usually not seen by site visitors and can be found in the root location of your server. It can be spotted only by crawlers that visit and cache your site. It is important to submit XML sitemaps to search engines. There are plugins that create these sitemaps. In WordPress, you can use SEO plugins like rank math, and All in one SEO which is able to create sitemaps automatically. 

In drupal, you need to install special plugins, for example, a simple sitemap plugin.