When building a business website, the two main things to keep in mind are usability and optimization. Usability refers to the ease of use of the site for the end user. Optimization refers to having the site place as well as it can in search engine results. Often, web design is done in a way that actually trades off search engine optimization value. This need not be the case.

Here are 5 Ways To Improve Your Site’s Design & Rankings.

1. Page Load Times

Many of the major search engines have factored in the time it takes a page to load when determining search engine ranking. The algorithms are thinking, most likely correctly, that a human user will not want to wait on a long page load time. This decreases the relevance of a web page, which definitely decreases search engine ranking.

However, improving the visual element of a web page, and thus its usability, usually begs for greater use of resources, and thus, a longer load time. However, here is what you can do to optimize your load time.

Optimize all images so they are not too load heavy. Photo editing programs are able to easily compress image data, many times losslessly.

Consider a file hosting service, which allows you to host all of your media and images on their service. The data will then be mirrored on their multiple server global network, and the media that loads will be the data from the closest physical server to the user.

Optimize your CSS. Many times stylesheets can be consolidated with no loss of performance or data. Also, if any javascript or widgets are running, make sure to have them load after the main content does. If you have it load first, and it doesn’t, it can take down the entire site’s load process and kill both your usability and optimization.

2. Use HTML 5

HTML 5 is a Flash alternative that improves load times while still enabling webmasters to have rich content on their web sites.

HTML 5 tags are much more precise, and allow for much more structure in content. Search engines love organization, and the specific tags in HTML 5 give a webmaster the opportunity to section off certain parts of pages as relevant to specific keywords.

Though the major search engines have not yet decided how to factor in HTML 5 into search engine rankings, increased organization and better metatags can only help things, now and in the future.

3. Optimizing your Images

Filenames of images should be named after keywords, as either the keyword itself or something that describes it. Also, use dashes to separate words instead of spaces or underscores. Search engine spiders like dashes much better.

Search engines now also factor in your images’ alt attributes (the desciptive text about an image that you see on mouseover). Alt attributes are now used by search engines to index the keywords for a particular image. Use them to send another signal to the search engines what the main focus of a certain page is.

You can also use this tactic for hyperlinks which point internally. The title attribute in hyperlinks serves the same purpose as a signal for search engines as alt tags do for images.

4. Copy Elements

Header tags are essential to optimizing both search engine optimization and the user experience. Search engines use header tags to determine what the main ideas of web pages are about. Basically, keywords put in header tags are assigned a greater weight and serve as queues for the rest of the page.

However, separating a page into sections also helps the reader follow the copy more easily.

5. Flash Hacks

Those in the know are actually moving away from Flash based web sites, as there are better alternatives for rich media content that are less resource heavy. However, this does not mean that it is necessarily wrong to have Flash elements on a web site. They should just be optimized in order to maximize their efficiency.

First of all, Flash sites should have HTML counterparts. Many elements of Flash do not register at all in search engines, and the HTML site is where you can put all of your meta descriptions, page titles, and text links that do register. Also, some browsers still have trouble with Flash, as do users with slower Internet connections. You can use javascript to find these people and serve them the HTML version of your web site automatically.

The parts of Flash that you can optimize, like the filenames, should be optimized. Send as many signals as you can to a search engine about the focus of a page. This means that your Flash filenames should be named descriptive keywords, and dashes should be used to separate words.

Lastly, make sure to place descriptive, similarly optimized text that describes the Flash object.

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