Bed and Breakfast Website Optimization Services
If your site has been designed by Strategic Web Ventures you can skip this information - if not, the following information is crucial to the success of your bed and breakfast website. If this information seems overwhelming we will be more than happy to contact you regarding any questions you may have.
If your online presence is to be a success it is of the utmost importance that the site and its pages be thoroughly optimized. Below are the 10 basic questions that need addressed.
- Is the site accessible to search engines and users?
- Is the sites HTML up to W3C standards?
- Is the sites coding optimized using validated CSS?
- Are the graphics optimized?
- Have usability and navigation been addressed?
- How large are the pages (measured in kilobytes)?
- Have the title and meta tags been optimized?
- Have h/heading tags been used properly?
- Has the content been optimized for users and search engines?
- Is the website hosted on fast reliable servers?
Website Accessibility
An often overlooked area for many bed and breakfast website design firms. The internet is fast becoming the preferred way of finding information on all topics for the visually impaired along with those users that must use special equipment, browsers, screen readers, and software to access the internet. Do you want to increase your bed and breakfast business - increase its accessibility to more users and browsers.
If your pages look fine using a text only browser than chances are it will look good and be easy for search engines to crawl and index.
HTML and W3C Standards
This has been discussed in the bed and breakfast website design and development area of this site and can be read about in depth in the article The Importance of Website Validation. We have recoded, redesigned, and optimized pages of bed and breakfast sites and watched them go from several pages back to the front page of search engine results with these being the only changes. Do not let a website development firm tell you it is not important to have a clean coded site that validates to W3C standards - they are either ignorant or incompetent of providing this service.
This is overlooked by most bed and breakfast website design firms who tend to clutter up the HTML with invalid, unneeded, or redundant code which is less likely to be viewed correctly, increases page load time, and has been known to choke search engine spiders/crawlers trying to index the site.
To check your site go to http://lovejoy.w3.org/
Use of Validated CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
This has also been discussed in the bed and breakfast website design and development area of this site. CSS allows for easy maintenance and/or website changes saving expenses to the bed and breakfast website owner who wishes to change certain aspects of the site. You can make one change to the CSS file and it will apply that change site-wide without ever changing the pages themselves.
CSS takes much of the HTML code for fonts and formatting and stores it off the page in a separate file. This reduces the page code for both visitors and search engine crawlers/spiders.
To see if your bed and breakfast websites CSS validates go to the CSS Validator
Graphics Optimization
A bed and breakfast website tends to be graphical by nature to attract guests to their accommodations. It is very easy for the graphics/photographs to get out-of-hand which can make the site almost inaccessible to users on dial-up internet connections.
It is the bed and breakfast website designers job to ensure proper steps have been taken to optimize all graphics for size and alternative text.
Usability and Navigation
A perfect example of what not to use is drop-down menus or JavaScript links for navigation. This will be detrimental to both search engines and users leaving the site inaccessible and un-crawlable.
Clear and concise navigation with optimized navigation links and page names is preferred for search engines and users.
Page Size
As discussed above all content, graphics, and site design elements must be optimized for your bed and breakfast website. If graphics or photos get too large some of the information will not be indexed by the search engines and will be inaccessible to users on dial-up connections. Google will cache the first 80K of a page and all information after that will not be used. Page sizes above 40K are common in bed and breakfast designs, but keep in mind the smaller the better.
Title and Meta Tags
These should be optimized for on-page content and not what terms you are going after. It's amazing how many bed and breakfast designers repeat the same title and meta tags throughout the entire site. If you are going after specific terms then write the content that coincides with those terms. Some search engines place more value on the title tags than others and only one of the major search engines use the "keywords" meta data.
Heading Tags
Proper use of heading tags are essential to ranking your bed and breakfast website in the search engines. Heading tags most frequently used include h1, h2, and h3.
Optimized Content
Your content should be clear and concise to the user and properly positioned on the page for the search engines. If your content is stuffed with keyword and keyword throughout - it not only projects a poor image of your bed and breakfast to the user, but could entail a penalty by the search engines.
Website Hosting
This subject is discussed in depth by choosing "Hosting" from our navigation. It is crucial to find a reliable host with great support and fast servers for your bed and breakfast website. All it takes is your site to go down while the search engines are crawling your site and you could be dropped from their index for up to a month. Hosting varies so much in price, support, server speed, and redundant connections to major data-pipes that it is nearly impossible for even the experienced developer to sort through it all.
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