There are many things that you should consider and that you should know if you are in the process of optimizing your website.
1. There are still many slow Internet connexions out there.
If you live in a big city you probably have optical fiber or cable Internet, which is blazing fast. If you run an E-Commerce website, it’s most likely that you get sales from all over the place, and many of your customers or potential customer will be lucky enough to have a 5MB/s DSL line, but it’s most likely that most of them have a simple 1mb/s DSL or 3G connexion! It is also most likely that those people don’t have access to a big variety of physical stores, so they have to shop online to find the products they need. If your website is too slow, forget it, they will just give up. Make your website simple and fast, avoid background videos at all cost. If you have product videos, make sure that it is up to the user to start playing the media.
2. Above the fold content is King.
It may sound crazy to you, but there are still many people who have no idea on how to scroll a web page. Go and see your parents or elderly people surf the Internet, you will not believe your eyes. You are about to experience a whole new world how the Internet is being used.
The point is: Make the important content visible immediately, avoid big pictures in the fold! As a matter of fact, did you know that Google gives more consideration to the content that is visible?
Here is an example provided by French SEO Consultant Patrice Krysztofiak showing the disaster of adding a huge picture above the fold (data are taken out of SEMrush). His customer slightly changed the design of his website without notice. He checked the option “big picture for featured images” on his WordPress blog options. A few weeks later his website positions and traffic dropped in a significant manner.
If you think about it, look at Amazon’s website. Amazon is a world leader in online shopping, the website shows up everywhere, the website is simple, not a single big picture is hiding the textual content. You can basically buy the item you want without ever scrolling any page.
3. NoFollow and NoIndex are 2 very powerful strategies.
Do not hesitate to use NoIndex on pages and NoFollow on links of your web site. “Useless” pages and links are stealing link juice from other more interesting pages.
Why should you place a DoFollow link to a contact page, for example? This “power” should be kept for more commercial content. Do not hesitate to NoIndex Legal terms, Contact or empty pages (thin content). Google will definitely thank you for that.
4. Stick with the basics.
With the recent improvements of the HTML language, the temptation of building a super fancy website is high. Effects everywhere, animations, sound etc. In the real world, it is very hard for such websites to gain good positions on Google. Even if the Google bot is getting better and better at reading Javascript, Ajax and other dynamic technologies, it is clear that simple websites that load fast and where each page is designed to target 1 subject have a big advantage. So keep your web site fast and simple and Google will reward you. Do not clutter, stick to the basics!
Bonus: Don’t forget to optimize your site for mobile. Read 5 tips to speed up your mobile website!