How to Kick Your Site into Overdrive

Ever hear folks talking about websites and they use a bunch of letters that sound like they belong with cars: GT, SS, GTO, SEO, SEF, URL? Okay, so maybe I’ve mixed them up a little bit.

But just like the right tires can make a difference in the ride and performance of your car, there are things you can do to improve the performance of your website.

SEF can improve your SEO

We build websites using Joomla, and Joomla now offers a simple button click to turn on Search-Engine-Friendly (SEF) URLS.  What are URLs? URL stands for Uniform Relational Locator. Every page on the www has a url or what you probably call a web address. When you enable the SEF URLS on a website you get a web address that’s easy to read by humans, and therefore considered to be friendlier by Google and its (ro)bots, which can help your site rank higher in search results compared to a site using the default urls.

Google is your Mechanic & Police

Back to that car analogy – ever take your car to your mechanic and say I’m not sure what’s wrong, but it’s just not performing well, got any suggestions?  

In the world of websites, Google is the ultimate mechanic. By setting up a Google Webmaster’s account, you can get Google’s recommendations for things that might help your site perform better in search results. You’ll also get notifications when Google finds a problem with your site or believes your site may have been hacked, and they take those warnings very seriously and expect you and your web administrator to as well. So I guess you could say they’re not JUST the mechanic – sometimes, they’re the police too – trying to serve and protect the users of the www.

Give Google (and your website visitors) a map

One final car analogy: when you want to tell a friend how to find you on a trip, there’s a good chance you’ll not simply supply them with an address (URL), but you might also give them a map so they can see the big picture of how to find you.

The same goes for the web. We install a component called OSMap on every website we build. Using this component, we’re able to generate a sitemap that lists all the menu items or URLS available on a domain. We can also tell the component to update the list on a schedule, usually once a week, so that any new content gets indexed automatically. We then go back to your Google Webmaster Tools account and submit the url that hosts the newly generated sitemap. This tells Google exactly where and how to find the pages of a site or the URLs. This can also improve your ranking in search results.

So take advantage of the easy things you can do to improve the performance of your website and keep it at the front of the pack!

If these acronyms and components are still above your head, give us a call when it’s time to build a new website. We’ll take care of adding them for you.