How Website Redesign can Improve Search Results: Part 2

In the first of this article we discussed three factors that have to be given consideration during web redesign process. In today's article we will touch upon other factors too.

4) Download speed: A slow website can ruin user experience. A user is very much likely to exit a slow loading webpage rather than wait for it. Google has taken notice of it and in April 2010 strongly emphasized on reducing webpage download speeds.

Google went to the extent of saying that webpage speed will be factored in their search engine algorithm. If your website downloads very slowly then check thoroughly the root causes. Is it a Flash banner or a heavy image? Many times inefficient programming or bloated code can also affect speed.

Thus a slow loading page can harm you in 2 ways: One, a user will not wait for the page to download and move away to a site which is faster. Secondly, Google may penalize your website and your search engine rankings may drop across all keywords.

5) Sitemaps: Many webmasters may think it as an unnecessary exercise but the fact is that search engines take it very seriously. Both, HTML version and XML version of sitemap are crucial. While the HTML version helps users in navigating the site, the XML version helps in getting all pages of a site indexed by search engines.

The HTML sitemap should ideally be accessible form the home page of the website. XML sitemap should be submitted to search engines for quicker indexing. The bigger the site, the more advantageous and important a sitemap is from SEO point of view.

6) Page Title: How many we have seen titles such "Home Page". Such titles do great harm to a site. Such uninformative title tells a search engine nothing about the page. A vital clue that a search engine and user can benefit from is wasted.

Rarely will you ever see a webpage opaque or uninformative titles doing well in search engine rankings. Always, add titles relevant to the page name and content.

7) Content Optimization: Good content is not enough. Proper use of H1, H2,H3… and links is very vital.

Headings and strong tags signal to bots on which text is important. Always use keywords or key phrases within these tags.

Internal links are another factor. Web pages should be interlinked to increase usability of a website. Links should be optimized by using keywords and key phrases.

8) Images: Images need to be lightweight. Heavy images can drastically increase page download time. Image names should have keywords related to the page name. If the page is about Ferrari cars then the images used should have Ferrari as keyword.
Never forget to add Alt attribute. It should be a short yet keyword rich sentence.

9) Custom error pages: Many websites lose a chunk of visitors due to improper error handling pages. A custom error page can help a user navigate the site even if s/he encounters page not found error.