How to optimize your website

The significance of having an online presence these days should not be undervalued. Having a online pool store allows you to be more competitive by opening new business opportunities. The strategic importance of a website can be seen from the fact that at the moment there are over two billion websites on the internet and growing. To make sure that your store is a success and found by potential customers, you need to optimize your site. Website optimization will help your store get noticed via higher search engines rankings.

Why should I optimize my website?

It's simple....If your potential customer can not find you online, they will be buying from your competition. Over 85% of online shoppers use search engine results to find what they're looking for on the web. This means that if your page is not ranked in the top 20 to 30 search results, it will be hard for your online store to succeed on a larger scale.

What exactly is website optimization?

Website optimization is the process of designing your webpage(s) to have a high rank in popular search engine results. If you're determined to have a successful online pool store, then optimizing your webpage is the next necessary step. When adding new webpages, it's essential that you tailor it to get a higher ranking in search engine results.

Meta tags, keywords, title tags, image alt tags, link backs and content help raise the ranking of your website. Though many search engines nowadays are no longer using Meta tags to gain a high page ranking, they are still important and should be included when creating your webpage(s). Learn how to choose the correct keywords for your website.

Content

The amount, and quality, of content is one of the most important factors when it comes to search engine optimization. The more quality content on your website, the more reasons for customers to visit your store. When composing your text for your site, it should contain plenty of important key words and phrases used in different ways. Also, keep in mind that your keywords and phrases should appear 3 - 7 times in your text.

Link Backs

A back link is an incoming link to a website or webpage from another website or webpage. Back links are also known as inbound links, in-links, incoming links and inward links. The number of incoming links is one of the strongest indicators of a website's popularity and importance. Back links come in various forms: one-way links, reciprocal links, theme-based links, links from directory submission, two-way links and three-way links.

One-way links are most beneficial to a website's ranking. The best way to increase the number of one-way links to your website is through directory submission. Other ways to increase your website's ranking include reciprocal link exchanges and three-way link exchanges.

Keywords and Phrases

For example...if your webpage is about testing a pools pH, then the best keyword or phrase may be "how to test pH" or "testing pH". When drafting the content of your website, always make sure that you concentrate on just a few important keywords and phrases per webpage. Learn more on selecting keywords and phrases that best describe the webpage you are creating.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are an HTML code that is found between the < HEAD> and < /HEAD> tags of a website. These tags contain a description of your site and used by search engine to determine what your webpage is about. Make sure that your Meta tags include your page title, description and most important keywords, ensuring search engine crawlers know exactly what the webpage is all about.

Image Alt Tags

An image alt tag comes after the HTML code used to portrait an image. To fully optimize your graphics and your website, make sure to insert a readable keyword phrase within the img alt tags. Example:

<img src="custom_images/picture.jpg" alt="Picture Description" > where src="" is the path where your image is located and the alt="" is the description of the image being displayed.

Title Tags

The Title tag of your webpage should always contain the most important keyword phrase of the page you are creating. Including the title will aid search engines, helping boost your search engine ranking.


Learn how to create a webpage with keywords and title tags at our create or modify a webpage link. For help on how to choose the correct keywords, see our choosing keywords webpage.