Website Optimization: Making It Smaller For Bigger Results
May 29, 2009 by Adam Webster
Filed under SEO
There are those who don’t understand that you download content every single time you visit a website. It’s true that in order for the digital media to be displayed on your screen things such as images and even text need to be downloaded. Ironically there are many web surfers that swear up and down they will never do any sort of downloading and they have no idea that this is precisely what they are doing every time they go to a website! Funny as that is, it also needs to be taken into account that because downloading is the process that occurs, files on the site need to be very small so that the load times are cut down, which is one of the best things you can do for website optimization.
In doing this, a person’s visit to a website will be made much more tolerable and may even guarantee return visits.
The first thing you can do is reduce the size of images. Images often take up the most space on a web, and even though they are required to enhance the overall user experience, there are steps that you can take to ensure that they download properly on the user end. In the old days the trick was to reduce the amount of colors in the image, but in today’s world that just won’t work. The best thing you can do is use a graphic design program to convert all of your web images to.png. This format is extremely small, and is perfect for website content.
Hosting video content on your main site is never a good idea. If you have a video that you want other users to see then it is best to have it streamed from another website. If you have the resources then you could set up another server to host videos on, that way any type of video may be streamed from the alternative server instead of the main one.
If you are finding that you are receiving more traffic that you had thought then you should also go ahead and distribute your content out amongst various servers. In this you can be sure that content is streamed by the server that has the least load meaning that users will get their page up as quickly as possible.
If you are offering physical downloads such as games, videos, game patches, or anything of a downloadable nature then you need to split it up into servers. Putting it on different servers helps alleviate stress on the connection and you could also set it up so that users have to possess a paid account on your site in order to get optimal download speeds.
Finally you should definitely try to do some keyword optimization, or SEO. This means that you place specific keywords in your meta tags or the site, and you guarantee that these are words that people will be searching for when they go to their favorite search engine.
If you know what you’re doing then setting up a web page will never be hard. The only hard part is making it usable and efficient but there are a lot of materials out there to give you a helping hand so you’ll never be alone in your never ending quest for optimization.
