0Ranking
Let’s take a look at some IMPORTANT key points to follow while doing SEO for your Website. Tried to cover all the important points in a broader way. Lets get into each & improve our Website’s SEO ranking.
1. Improving the page load speed by reducing HTTP Requests:
Here are some techniques for reducing the number of HTTP requests required to render the page, while still supporting rich page designs. Making your page fast for first time visitors is the key to a better user experience
- Combining the files : By combining all scripts into a single script and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet will improve your page response times.
- CSS Sprites : Reduce the number of image requests by combining your background images into a single image and by using the CSS background image & background position properties for displaying them.
- Image Maps : Is used for combining multiple images into a single image, inturn reducing the number of HTTP requests and speeding up the page. (Image maps works only if the images are contiguous in the page)
- Inline images : To reduce the HTTP requests, we can use data : URL scheme for embedding the image data in the page.
- Expires header : Using Expires header we can make our scripts, stylesheets, images, and Flash in the page cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views.
- Gzip Components : Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. When a web server sees Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate header in the request, it will compress the response using one of the methods listed by the client( Content-Encoding: gzip). Gzipping as many file types as possible is an easy way to reduce page weight and accelerate the user experience.
- Optimize using CSS Sprite: CSS sprites are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests made for image resources referenced by your site. Images are combined into one larger image at defined X and Y coordinates. This technique can be very effective for improving site performance, particularly in situations where many small images, such as menu icons, are used.
2. Keeping Style Sheets at the top: Keeping stylesheets in the HEAD allows the page to render progressively and makes pages load faster.
3. Keeping Scripts at the bottom: If we are using a deferred script (DEFER attribute), it can be moved to the bottom of the page. That will make our web pages load faster.
4. Avoid CSS Expressions: CSS expressions are the strong way to set CSS properties dynamically. It is better to avoid them.
5. Minify Java Script & CSS: Some popular tools like JSMin & YUI Compressor can be used for minifying Java Script.
6. Avoid Redirections: Redirects are accomplished using the 301 and 302 status codes. The preferred technique is to use the standard 3xx HTTP status codes, primarily to ensure the back button works correctly. Redirection slows down the user experience. Inserting a redirect between the user and the HTML document delays everything in the page since nothing in the page can be rendered and no components can start being downloaded until the HTML document has arrived.
7. Avoid Duplication of Scripts: Avoid including the same JavaScript files twice in a single web page because duplicate scripts disturbs performance by creating unnecessary HTTP requests and wasted JavaScript execution.
8. Use the Flush Function : In PHP, Flush function allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that the browser can start fetching components while your backend is busy with loading the rest of the HTML page.
9. Pre-loading Components: By using preloads like Unconditional, Conditional & Anticipated preloads, by the time the user is visiting the next page, we can have most of the components already in the cache and our page will load much faster for the user.
10. Reduce the number of iFrames: iFrames allows a HTML document to be inserted in the parent document.
11. Optimise Images: Run any PNG optimizer tool on all your PNG files, in the same way run jpegtran on all your JPEG files. Convert GIF files to PNG files.
12. Optimising HTML Tags:
- Title tag : Title is an important factor in On-Page optimisation which is used for display in SERP. For best results try to use primary keywords with 60 character limit & which are relevant to the page content in the title tag.
- Mete Description : Give a keyword rich description about the page within 150 characters.
- Heading tags : The search engines uses the heading tags for the keywords. For best practice try not to use more than 30 heading tags in the webpage and no heading tags longer than 120 characters and use only one H1.
- Language tag : Always use a language attribute on the html tag to declare the default language of the text in the page.
- Alt tag : Use a descriptive alt attribute for image files which helps search engines to better understand the Image.
- Anchor tags : Use as many possible Anchor texts for interlinking different pages on the site.
- Use a Robots.txt file
- XML Site map : Create a site map which helps in improving the efficiency of crawling your site by web crawlers.
