If you’d like to explore your web design school or career options, you’re going to have to understand website optimization at some point. Before you can do what web designers do, you have to think how web designers think! Understanding website optimization is a fundamental part of becoming a web designer, and we’re breaking it down here for you today with these design industry tips.
What is website optimization?
Well, over the years, the term has expanded to take on different meanings. Generally, there are two parts to the answer:
1. SEO OPTIMIZATION
Web optimization is also known as search engine optimization or SEO. It describes the process of optimizing, or improving, a website so that it ranks higher in search engine results. When it comes to SEO, you’ll optimize various components of the site, some seen by humans, others only seen by search engines themselves. Some of these components include: making sure the site includes relevant keywords, phrases, image tags, Meta tags and descriptions and backlinks to other relevant and/or authoritative sites. All of these things help to improve the website’s chances of being indexed by search engines.
2. WEBSITE PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION
Web optimization also refers to procedures taken in order to optimize, or improve, the speed of the site. In other words, does the site load in web browsers at a sufficient speed? This type of site optimization involves improving scripts, CSS code and/or HTML code so the website will load faster. Optimizing a site’s speed also means reducing the amount of components used to extract the webpage, such as scripts, images and video components.
WHAT IS WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION FROM THE SEARCH ENGINE’S POINT OF VIEW?
What is website optimization on the SEO level? It’s all about making necessary changes to ensure higher rankings in search engine results. In other words, a user enters a search phrase in Google, Bing, Yahoo or another search engine. When the results for that keyword phrase are returned, where your site appears, (#4 on the first page, #10 on the second page, etc…) is its ranking for that particular keyword search term.
Search engine rankings are based on a number of factors:
- Site’s relevance to the searched keywords
- Site’s readability to both search engines and users
- Site’s popularity with other users
- How often fresh, new content is published on the site
The more relevant search engines determine the site to be for the specific search term, the higher that site will rank in the search engine results. This is very important for site owners and website marketers. Why? Well, statistics show that over 60% of all online users never look past the first page of search results. So, appearing on that first page is vital for business!
SEO helps to push a site’s rankings as high as possible. This is done by addressing various factors, such as:
- Selecting relevant, popularly searched keywords
- Regularly publishing fresh, new content
- Creating web designs that are search engine-friendly
- Building backlinks to relevant and/or authoritative sites
- Resolving any technical issues that confuse search engines or drive them away
HOW CAN SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION IMPROVE YOUR CAREER?
Learning SEO is important if you plan to find a web design career. In the web design industry, your job will be to optimize the site with an SEO-friendly website title, description, meta tags, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. You’ll also be required to use SEO keywords throughout the site, as well as publish SEO-friendly, relevant, interesting content on the site.
But, in order to take your web design career to major heights, you’ll need to know other web optimization tricks. That means learning such things as programming languages and code in order to improve the speed and overall performance of a site.
FIND YOUR WEB DESIGN EDUCATION ANSWER WITH US!
Here at F.I.R.S.T. Institute, we strive every day to be of service to our students and provide them with the very best Graphic and Web Design education that we can offer — from a faculty made up of experienced design industry professionals to a broad spectrum of courses and a dedicated Career Development department, we do all we can to ensure that our students receive the best possible educational opportunities. We give students access to everything they need to succeed, both in class and on the job.
If you’d like to know more about web design school and our program, please give us a call or send us an email! Our admissions team are standing by to answer any questions you might have.
Learn more about our graphic and web development course by clicking here.
