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Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines

[Providing Proper Meta-Tags] [Reducing Your Home Page File Size]
[Increasing Your Web Site Popularity Rating]

Reducing Your Home Page Size For a Better Search Engine Listing

It is possible that if your page size is too large, a search engine spider that wants to index your homepage and entire site, might skip you if it Times Out while loading your page. Higher connecting speeds are giving us the opportunity to use much more graphics and multimedia in our websites, but our home page should still be considered to be the gateway that leads you to this information, in lieu of the place that splashes it there for everyone to see upon first arriving.

The size of your home page consists of the html file, all graphics being loaded and all scripts being imported. Even if you have the most perfect Meta-Tags and verbiage throughout the page, none of that will matter if your page is skipped. It is best to keep the total size of your Home page to less than 125,000 bytes.

Working With Your Text

The text of your website often only marginally affects the size of your page, unless you have lots and lots of text, where you are scrolling down and down and down. We've all seen those pages somewhere.. The actual html page, which is all text, loads extremely quick. Depending upon what it is you have to say, it is good to have your HTML page size below 50K bytes. If there is so very much you need to say, break your page into sections where each section begins the article, then provide a link that says "Read More" or "Click Here To Continue" and place the rest of the article on another page.

I find that as I make changes to a page, I often comment out certain items that I am not using anymore, but I just don't want to delete this information yet in case I plan to use it again. After a while, there can be a lot of areas on a page that are simply not being used and therefore should be deleted. If the information is something you wish to save, create a separate text file called "valued-web-info.txt". Copy and paste all the important information to the text file and then delete all the unnecessary code on the html page.

Another thing to bear in mind when placing text on your page is to make use of the <H1> - <H5> tags. Search engines still give preference to whatever may be written inside these tags as compared to what else might be written outside of them. Since their default sizes and font styles might not be desirable, simply use additional FONT or STYLE tags to make them fit into the style and likeness of your web page.

Reducing Graphic Size and Use

Graphics make a page come to life. I believe they are essential to grabbing the eye of whoever comes to a page, so it's important to create a good balance between being appealing to the eye and increasing your page load time to the point where customers and search engine spiders dump you.

Here are some suggestions that will allow you to be colorful and unique without burning too many bytes:

• Use a background color instead of a background image

• Reduce the physical size of graphics to not more than 250 pixels in any direction. You can get the same point across with this smaller graphic as you could the larger one. It's a matter of you becoming comfortable with the new thought that your graphics don't have to be big.

• Use the <HR> Tag for dividers instead of graphic bars. The WIDTH attribute lets you determine it's width across the screen...the SIZE attribute lets you determine its vertical height and the COLOR attribute lets you determine its color.

• Use the GIF format for any image that is not photographic. It will use much less memory than a JPG in this case. For example, the two color blocks below are identical images saved in two different formats. As you can see, the GIF format used only 1/3 the bytes as compared to the JPG format, because this isn't a photographic image. You'll even notice that the JPG version is also less clear and even a little mottled. Not a great payback considering it's also chewing up more memory as well.
  

  250x250 colored block saved in 16 color GIF format - 4KB file size	250x250 colored block saved in 16 million color JPG format at 15% compression - 12KB file size

• When using the JPG with photographic images, you can optimize the image by selecting your desired compression rate. The higher the compression rate, the smaller the image size, but the higher the image loss might be. You will want to compress at a minimum of 15%, but anything beyond 60% starts to appear blurred. The photographic images below are saved at 15%, 35%, 55% and 75% compression levels.
  

  15% Compression - 7KB file size	35% Compression - 5KB file size	55% Compression - 4KB file size	75% Compression - 3KB file size

• As an extra bonus, wherever you do use graphics, be sure to make use of the ALT tag and provide a description that also makes use of your sites most desirable keywords. This adds to the value of your keywords and makes them more likely to be used.