Thursday, May 28, 2009

Website Optimization: Making It Smaller For Bigger Results

By Adam Webster

What many people do not realize is that every time you visit a website, you download its contents to your computer. There are many people who swear up and down that they will never download a file when in truth they already have. This is where website optimization comes in.

In order to stay at the top of the rankings and keep people coming back you either need to minimize the amount of content downloaded or make it very small. If you do the proper website optimization, it won't take very long for a file to be downloaded to a user's computer, thereby making the web surfing experience a little more pleasant.

The first thing that you need to do is cut down on image size, especially images that are going to be seen frequently. The larger an image is, the more bandwidth it will take to load it and while you can do this by cutting down on the mages themselves, and it's a fair bet that no one wants to look at a text filled page all the time. In this case what you need to do is reduce the size of your images. Unfortunately we are past the days when the.gif extension was enough because people possess graphics cards that can display more than 256 collars. Your best option in this case is to use what is known as.png format. This format compresses the image but keeps the same quality making it perfect for web 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 experiencing heavy user load, then you could opt to store all of your content on various servers, and have it loaded from the server that is the least busy. In doing this you reduce the amount of people trying to download from a single server. This means that wait times for the website to load are reduced and more people will come back to visit your website.

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.

The next thing that you can do is what is known as keyword optimization, or SEO. This is the act of placing specific keywords in your meta tags, alt tags or even your page itself that people will search for.

If you know what you're doing then setting up a web page will never be hard. The only hard part is making it useable 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.

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