The New Year is here, and a lot of people are already thinking of their personal resolutions. Resolutions are made with hopes of bettering habits and improving live. Why not have the same dreams of improvement for not only yourself but your small business?
2014 could also be a chance for you to make changes in the way you do your business. Even if business is running smooth, there’s always room for improvement. To encourage your online growth, here are some free SEO tips to start 2014 off on the right foot.
Improve you website’s loading speed.
Nobody likes a slow loading website. If a visitor has to wait more than a few seconds, they’ll leave. Use a website like gtmetrix.com to identify what is causing your website to load slowly, fix it, and optimize your website for fast load times.
Avoid heavy images.
For the same reasons mentioned above, by avoiding using over-sized images you’ll improve your website’s loading speed. Scale down the size of images to the dimensions that you’ll be displaying it on the website. There’s no need to load an original size 5000 px by 4000 px picture if you’re only embedding it on your website at 600 px wide.
Additionally, lossless compression programs can help you minimize the file size of an image without taking away from its visual clarity. All it does is make the image lighter by removing the unneeded bytes. On our Mac’s at SEO National, we like to use a program called ImageOptim.
Optimize your website code.
W3c.org serves as an international community for website owners to develop open standards to promote long-term growth and consistency across the internet. The organization, members, staff and general public work side-by-side to make sure that websites can reach their full potential by setting standards. By following those standards, you’re website is ensured to load more consistently across the ever-changing landscape of varying laptops, PC’s, smartphones, tablets, and browser. By being cross-browser and cross-device friendly, you’re website is sure to load clean and look good for any visitor.
As a business owner, it is a must that you provide a better website to improve your visitors’ and customers’ experience while browsing. Make the most of 2014 for yourself and your business. Happy New Year.
