General Optimization

The general optimization guide outlines basic techniques that you should follow to keep your website fully optimized. These general rules are a little more abstract then the others and don't fit into a specific category.

Here is our growing list of recommended principles to follow for general optimization. All these rules come from extensive research and have been implemented in our Professional SEO Tool. Rather than optimizing general aspects of your website manually, our tool will analyze those general elements and give you specific optimization suggestions to perform that are specific to a page. Signup Free for the easy way to optimize general aspects of your website.

Page Size

If your visitors can navigate through your site quickly, they will be more attentive towards your content. High load times will only frustrate visitors and will cause them to click the back button to visit another search engine result.

The total size of a web page's text content should not exceed 100 KB. Optimally it would be best if the page text were closer to 40 KB in size. If you run into this problem and cannot condense the page, consider splitting the page up into several pages that target different keyword phrases. The more concise and targeted each page is for a single keyword phrase, the better your rankings will be.

Check the size & load times of your page with our Website Speed Test Tool.

Page Freshness

The more often your webpage content changes, the more frequently both visitors and search engines will return to view these changes. A stale site is a boring site! Try to go over your pages as often as you can to improve them. Even if it is a small change, at least it shows that your web pages are actively paid attention to. As a general guideline, try to update each of your pages at least every 6 months.

MetaTag Description

Your metatag description should briefly describe your page in 200 characters or less. It is very important that each page of your website has a unique metatag description.

Although metatags are not as important as they once were, the metatag description is still used for display purposes. For instance, Google will use the metatag description in the description for each search listing. You should describe your webpage in a concise and detailed manner to entice a searcher to click on your link.

See how your listing will look in a search engine with our Search Engine Listing Preview Tool.

Page Redirect

Your webpage should return an HTTP status code of 200. 301 Redirects will cause problems when a search engine crawler attempts to crawl that particular webpage.

You can view your HTTP headers using the HTTP Header Viewer Tool.

Indexed by Google

If your webpage does not exist in Google's index, you can either submit the page manually or submit a ROR sitemap.

Automatically generate a sitemap using our ROR Sitemap Generator Tool.

Indexed by Bing

If your webpage does not exist in Bing's index, you can either submit the page manually or submit a ROR sitemap.

Automatically generate a sitemap using our ROR Sitemap Generator Tool.

Javascript Validation

Sometimes it's hard to spot a reference to a broken Javascript file. Just like any other link on your website, it is important that all of your javascript files return a 200 http status code.

Verify all your javascript links are active by using our Broken Link Checker Tool.

Stylesheet Validation

Sometimes it's hard to spot a reference to a broken CSS file. Just like any other link on your website, it is important all your CSS files return a 200 http status code.

Verify all your CSS links are active by using our Broken Link Checker Tool.

Non-www Redirect

People that visit your website page and decide to link to that particular page will often link to www.yoursite.com/page.html or yoursite.com/page.html.

Search engines can mistakenly view these 2 urls as different web pages when in actuality they are not.

Instead of having 20 backlinks to www.yoursite.com/page.html, a search engine will determine you have 8 backlinks to yoursite.com/page.html and 12 backlinks to www.yoursite.com/page.html. This will dilute the trust signal these backlinks produce.

It is very important that you configure your web server to 301 redirect any requests to yoursite.com/*.html to www.yoursite.com/*.html.

Here is an example of how to do this with an Apache .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} . RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yoursite\.com [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Here is an example of how to do this within a Lighttpd config file:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "^([^.]+\.[^.]+)$" { url.redirect = ( "^/(.*)" => "http://www.%1/$1" ) }

Test your redirect or lack thereof using our HTTP Header Viewer Tool.


I've Optimized General Aspects of my Website, What's Next?

Proceed to the Link Building guide to continue optimizing your site. Or choose another optimization guide.