Website Optimization

So what is website optimization? Well, it’s the art of creating and continuously improving websites to improve the visitor experience, which is going to help result in higher visitor satisfaction, a better user experience, and high repeat visit and conversion rates. So it involves a lot of aspects, which we’re going to go into. First, is UX short for user experience. So that’s how a user is actually using your website. It needs to be as easy to use as possible. Next, is design, so how your website is laid out. So the visual components of your website, you know, is a sidebar on one side, where’s the navigation? That all goes into design.

And then finally, how a website displays information, so the graphics and the text of a website. All of these things work together to create a better more optimized website experience. It’s going to also help users find the information that they’re looking for and lead them to make a purchase, sign up for your email list, you know, whatever else you want them to do. So you go into SEO in a later module, but we’re going to talk a little bit about search engine optimization, SEO, in this module.

So SEO is basically making sure that a website’s information is organized correctly, so that’s going to make sure that your website is optimized correctly for SEO, and that’s going to make sure that your website can be found on search engines by users. So there’s a few terms that you need to know for SEO best practices, a few of those include metadata, which is the meta title tags and description. So, that’s the information that users see when they’re looking at search results. And then a site map, and that’s basically a list of all the pages on your site including blog posts and search engine crawlers use these to index your website.

I go into a few other common terms you need to know in the notes on this slide. So the difference between web site optimization and SEO, basically website optimization deals more with the actual experience of the user, so making the website easy to use, that’s going to be the formatting of the content, the buttons they click on, the interactive elements, the branding, the color, images, things like that. That all goes into the website optimization. Conversely, SEO is making it as easy as possible for search engines to find and index your website content, and search engines also want your content and your website to be user friendly so it works really well together.

So things like keyword usage, what content or text is in the headers and titles, that all plays into SEO. So SEO is basically, what is in place to help your website viewers get to your website and then website optimization is their experience once they get there.