Thursday, May 28, 2009

Website Optimization: Making It Smaller For Bigger Results

By Adam Webster

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 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 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 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.

Setting up a decent website is never hard, though optimizing it so that it will be usable can be. To easy the pain of this difficult process you can employ the help of a professional or seek out one of the many tutorials on the internet. However you do it, so long as you keep performance in mind, you're certain to have a decent website.

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