This article describes in simple terms, practical and effective tactics used to optimize your website. Following these suggestions, will result in a more enjoyable visitors experience and traffic. At the end of this article there is a Reference and Resources section where you can find supportive information and services related to each topic.
Compatibility With Web Browsers
It isn't a surprised for website owners, webmasters and others who are involved in their websites optimization, to see how different the web pages are displayed in various web browsers or between different web browsers version.
Displaying differences it's the result of how the various available web browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.), or their versions, handle HTML code, HTML errors or computer screen resolution used.
Title and Meta Tags
Meta tags are information inserted into the [HEAD][/HEAD] section of the HTML code of any web page. There are many type of meta tags. We will be considering only two of them and the [TITLE] tag.
From the visitor's point of view, the only tag visible within the head section is the title tag, which is not a meta tag itself, but a stand alone tag found in the head section of the web page. Think of the title tag as the subject of an email message.
Two of the most important meta tags are the keyword and description tags which are invisible to the visitor's eyes but should be also included if you want your page information (title and description) to be properly displayed on the search engine result page (SERP) listing.
In the early days of the Internet, one could influence the search result by including keywords within the meta keyword and meta description tags you wanted the search engine (SE) to classify your page for, today you cannot influence the result of the SE by just adding desirable keywords anymore.
Keyword tag should contain between 5 and 10 keywords that appear on the body of your page. You should never include keywords in the tag that do not appear on that page.
The Importance of ALT Tags
Many web surfer and visually challenged people browse the Internet with the image viewing option of their web browser turn off or using text readers respectively. When one of these surfer visits your site containing lot of images, they won't be able to read the content of your pages if the images do not contain the ALT="your image description" tags.
Browser Safe Color Palettes
Computer platforms handle color differently, and the web browser limits colors significantly. In order to move through the digital world with consistency, the web page designer must be well aware of this fact.
While in the real world all colors are the result of some subtractive combination of three primaries colors: red, yellow, and blue. In the digital world all colors are the result of additive color synthesis or combination of three primary colors: red, green, and blue, referred to as RGB for short.
RGB values are derived from a method that numerically determines how much red, green, and blue make up the color in question. Each color contains a percentage of red, green, and blue.
If colors outside the safe palette are used, many web site visitors will see the color the computer has available instead of the color you have called for.
Check For Broken Links
Broken links are links that lead to nowhere, and clicking on the link will show you a 404 error code page. It is said that about 5% to 7% of all links on the Internet are broken.
A site that contains broken links, including missing links to images, gives a very bad impression to potential visitors and it is a frequent cause of lost visitors.
Check Web Pages Load Time
Many Web surfers today browse the Internet through a high speed broadband connection, but a significant percentage of those Web surfers still use slow speed dial up connection to access the Web.
Surfers are known for having a very short attention span and will leave your site before the page finishes loading. Generally speaking, the maximum accepted time for a page to load is about 10 seconds, and it is recommended that your page to be around 25Kb in size.
Decreasing the loading time of a web page can be easily achieved by both, compressing or shrinking the size of your images, and reducing the size of your HTML code.
HTML Code Optimizer
An HTML Optimizer removes all blank spaces in your HTML code, and this is another way to make your page load faster. The result is shorter downloading time. Pages will be shown in a client's browser in exactly the same way, but the file size will be smaller.
Make sure that the HTML optimizer you use does not compress embedded script codes within your page, which might be rendered unusable if they get optimized this way.
BORDER, HEIGHT and WIDTH Attributes
The attributes used with the [IMG] tag to specify an image width and height are the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes indicating the exact size of your image in pixels. The other attribute that influences the way an image is rendered on the user's screen is the BORDER attribute, which should be set to zero if you don't want your hyperlinked image to show a blue border around it.
One interesting advantage to adding the height and width attributes to an image tag is that when you do specify the image size for all of your images, browsers take a lot less time to render your page. To find out the width and height of an image, just open it with any image editor and look for its property.
Validate Your HTML Code
Just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents using markup languages like HTML may, for numerous reasons, not be following these rules. The process of verifying whether a Web document actually follows the rules for the language it uses is called validation.
Different browsers, or versions of the same browser, will make different guesses about the same illegal code; even worse, if your HTML code is really bad, the browser could get confused and produce a mangled display mess, or even crash. Validating your HTML will help ensure that it displays properly on most browsers.
References and Resources
References and Resources
Compatibility With Web Browsers
It isn't a surprised for website owners, webmasters and others who are involved in their websites optimization, to see how different the web pages are displayed in various web browsers or between different web browsers version.
Displaying differences it's the result of how the various available web browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.), or their versions, handle HTML code, HTML errors or computer screen resolution used.
Title and Meta Tags
Meta tags are information inserted into the [HEAD][/HEAD] section of the HTML code of any web page. There are many type of meta tags. We will be considering only two of them and the [TITLE] tag.
From the visitor's point of view, the only tag visible within the head section is the title tag, which is not a meta tag itself, but a stand alone tag found in the head section of the web page. Think of the title tag as the subject of an email message.
Two of the most important meta tags are the keyword and description tags which are invisible to the visitor's eyes but should be also included if you want your page information (title and description) to be properly displayed on the search engine result page (SERP) listing.
In the early days of the Internet, one could influence the search result by including keywords within the meta keyword and meta description tags you wanted the search engine (SE) to classify your page for, today you cannot influence the result of the SE by just adding desirable keywords anymore.
Keyword tag should contain between 5 and 10 keywords that appear on the body of your page. You should never include keywords in the tag that do not appear on that page.
The Importance of ALT Tags
Many web surfer and visually challenged people browse the Internet with the image viewing option of their web browser turn off or using text readers respectively. When one of these surfer visits your site containing lot of images, they won't be able to read the content of your pages if the images do not contain the ALT="your image description" tags.
Browser Safe Color Palettes
Computer platforms handle color differently, and the web browser limits colors significantly. In order to move through the digital world with consistency, the web page designer must be well aware of this fact.
While in the real world all colors are the result of some subtractive combination of three primaries colors: red, yellow, and blue. In the digital world all colors are the result of additive color synthesis or combination of three primary colors: red, green, and blue, referred to as RGB for short.
RGB values are derived from a method that numerically determines how much red, green, and blue make up the color in question. Each color contains a percentage of red, green, and blue.
If colors outside the safe palette are used, many web site visitors will see the color the computer has available instead of the color you have called for.
Check For Broken Links
Broken links are links that lead to nowhere, and clicking on the link will show you a 404 error code page. It is said that about 5% to 7% of all links on the Internet are broken.
A site that contains broken links, including missing links to images, gives a very bad impression to potential visitors and it is a frequent cause of lost visitors.
Check Web Pages Load Time
Many Web surfers today browse the Internet through a high speed broadband connection, but a significant percentage of those Web surfers still use slow speed dial up connection to access the Web.
Surfers are known for having a very short attention span and will leave your site before the page finishes loading. Generally speaking, the maximum accepted time for a page to load is about 10 seconds, and it is recommended that your page to be around 25Kb in size.
Decreasing the loading time of a web page can be easily achieved by both, compressing or shrinking the size of your images, and reducing the size of your HTML code.
HTML Code Optimizer
An HTML Optimizer removes all blank spaces in your HTML code, and this is another way to make your page load faster. The result is shorter downloading time. Pages will be shown in a client's browser in exactly the same way, but the file size will be smaller.
Make sure that the HTML optimizer you use does not compress embedded script codes within your page, which might be rendered unusable if they get optimized this way.
BORDER, HEIGHT and WIDTH Attributes
The attributes used with the [IMG] tag to specify an image width and height are the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes indicating the exact size of your image in pixels. The other attribute that influences the way an image is rendered on the user's screen is the BORDER attribute, which should be set to zero if you don't want your hyperlinked image to show a blue border around it.
One interesting advantage to adding the height and width attributes to an image tag is that when you do specify the image size for all of your images, browsers take a lot less time to render your page. To find out the width and height of an image, just open it with any image editor and look for its property.
Validate Your HTML Code
Just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents using markup languages like HTML may, for numerous reasons, not be following these rules. The process of verifying whether a Web document actually follows the rules for the language it uses is called validation.
Different browsers, or versions of the same browser, will make different guesses about the same illegal code; even worse, if your HTML code is really bad, the browser could get confused and produce a mangled display mess, or even crash. Validating your HTML will help ensure that it displays properly on most browsers.
References and Resources
References and Resources
About the Author
Javier A Garcia is a successful Internet marketing expert and editor in chief of more than half a dozen websites targeted to people interested to start a work at home business or to work from home. With many years of experience in online marketing, website optimization and promotion.
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