Compress your graphics when possible

Most graphics programs like Fireworks and Adobe have easy to use, built in features for downsizing or compressing your graphics. You’d be surprised how many times you can knock the file size of your graphic by 20-30%. The bottom line is, smaller graphics load faster than larger ones and faster loading means your visitors spend their time converting instead of waiting.

It’s great to have larger, more detailed images available to your visitors, but you are generally better off to let them make an extra click to reach those images. You want your landing pages to always load as quickly as possible. Unless you want that potential customer to bail out while waiting for an 800k image, optimize those images.

Avoid splash or intro pages

Sure you can make a really cool flashy intro page for your site. But, why? No one has made useless, no-value, time-wasting splash pages for business-focused websites since the time when discussions about the President involved interns, blue dresses, and Ken Starr. In terms of attention span, most Web surfers are pretty much neck and neck with ferrets on a double espresso kick. They aren’t going to sit there and wait for your dog and pony show to load before they buy whatever it is you’re selling. Get them where they want to go with as few clicks, hitches, delays and pauses as you possibly can. Once you get them there, you can certainly present them with the option to view your plunge into digital self-expression… but it should never be a pre-requisite to them converting into a customer.

Always use ALT text

Search engines don’t see pictures- no matter how cool they are. As such, all images on your site should have accompanying ALT text. Title tags are great too, for keywords and helping to theme your pages. But at the very minimum you should have an ALT tag on your images to explain to the search engine spiders what the image is about.

Think about compatibility

Sometimes your designer will come to you and show you some new redesign or retooling of your site and it will flat out knock your socks off. It’ll be one of the coolest things you’ve ever seen online and you’ve never seen it anywhere else. Your first inclination might be to say “I love it! Get it online ASAP. However, what that designer didn’t tell you is that this part, or that part or anything below ‘here’ will actually only display for users using version whatever of browser beta 3.6 etc.

In other words, it isn’t going to work for some people. As a matter of fact, it may not work for most people… but yeah, it’s cool. As such, you should always ask of your developers/designers, and keep it in mind if you do it all yourself Does this get in the visitor’s way? You can’t be concerned with designing stuff today to look cool on the 2042 edition of Firefox.

Don’t over Flash

Don’t get me wrong. I love Flash. Flash is great. You can do all kinds of neat things in Flash. You can watch videos, play games, build applications – -the possibilities are limitless. The problem is, Search engine spiders don’t understand Flash. If all of the good content of your site is inside a Flash file, the search engine spiders will see exactly none of it. You may as well have spent that design money on the slots in Vegas. Therefore, if there isn’t anything on your page except for a little header information and a Flash file… guess what? That’s right, they aren’t going to see it. As such, I would advise anyone to be judicious in their use of Flash. You have to have some way of letting the search engine spiders see the content of your site and cloaking is not the solution. Cloaking makes people like Matt Cutts at Google shake his head just before de-listing your website. That’s a great way to get yourself in a really bad spot. The better solution is just to simply make sure there’s always enough real live text on your page to let the spiders know what it’s about.

So, to review:
-Compress your graphics when possible – Faster load times means converting visitors to customers faster.
-Avoid splash or intro pages – Most people search with a purpose, don’t delay them
-Always use ALT text – Let the spiders know what your cool graphics are
-Think about compatibility – Always design for the greatest number of users
-Don’t over Flash – Spiders can’t see it and there are even some version compatibility issues.

Video Transcript: In terms of visibility, the title tag is one of the most important components of your web page. Yet, for whatever reason, I see sites every day that don’t take advantage of it. Too often I see sites with a title tag of just their site name or company – on every page of their site – or, even worse, a long, jumbled string of keywords. That’s not going to accomplish much beyond making your site look spammy and cheap.

In terms of search engine optimization, the title tag is one of the most important aspects of your HTML page insofar as helping search spiders understand what your page is about.

Beyond crawlers and spiders though, the title tag is also extremely important to the users of your site. That’s because the title tag is the text that will be displayed at the top of the browser window. it will also be the text displayed in the navigation tabs if you are using a browser that supports tabs like firefox. Either way, it’s an easy way you can help people navigate your site.

One of the most common mistakes concerning title tags is just having one title for every page on your site. Every page on your site has a different focus or theme.. As such, you should have different tile tags for every one of these pages. Search engine spiders are coming to your site every day (hopefully) and their job is to figure out what your pages are about. If every page on your site is titled with just your business or domain name, you aren’t really telling them too much they don’t already know.

Think about it this way, search engine results don’t point at sites as much as they do pages within a site. As such, it’s a lot more effective to individually target and title the pages within your site to maximize your exposure to the internet spiders and make it easy for them to distinguish the pages within your site from one another.

Likewise, for your human users browsing thru your site wiith 10 tabs or windows open all over the place – if every one of those tabs or windows all just say yourcompanyname.com, they’re going to have a really hard time keeping track of what’s what.

If you were in the widget business for instance, you wouldn’t want the title of every page on your site to just be:

<title>Widget World, home of the web’s finest widgets. – WidgetWorld.com</title>

Trust me, neither the search spiders nor the end users care if this is indeed the home of the world’s finest widgets. Make your sales pitches elsewhere.

When you’re creating your title tags, it’s important ot have your most important keywords early in the tag. It’s generally accepted that words towards the beginning of your title tag are counted as being more significant than words later in your title tag. As such, you want to include the name of your site in your title tag – you want people to be able to easily idetify your pages from the title tag, but you should do it at the end of the tag, like we see in our example:

<title>Title Tag Tutorial – Jayde.com</title>

Now, let’s say you have a site that sells widgets. You’ve done your homework and have a separate page dedicated to each type of widget you sell. Each of these pages needs a unique title tag as well. Let’s Say you sell baseball widgets, soccer widgets and hockey widgets. Each of those pages should have it’s own dedicated title text.

If possible, it’s always good to be even more specific. If your company sells widgets for baseball, and you have separate widgets for left handed vs. right handed players you might try to make a page specifically for that and be sure you include that information in the title.

For example:

<title>Left handed baseball widgets for sale – WidgetWorld.com</title>

You want to think about query strings – in other words what words or phrases will people search, that this page should result for. Look at the content of your page, thiink about what that page is most specifically about and then create your title tag using the most specific and logical terms you can, followed by your business or domain name for branding/easy identification.

So, here are a few points you want to keep in mind insofar as your title tags are concerned:

- Create a unique title tag specific to every single page of your site

- Use the most important keywords early in the tag

- use your company name in every tag – towards the end

- Think about query strings (what are people going to search for)

- avoid hyperbole, sales pitches, and slogans