Optimize a website

Before starting to analyze your site in detail, get a google account and install google analytics (search for a howto on ehow.com, there are tons of them). There are several tools you could use, I just recommend Google Analytics because it's free and can be installed without serious problems. While Google Analytics is capturing data about your site's visitors, let's continue with the next step of analysis.

Open your website and have a look at its navigation:
- is the navigation clear for your target audience or might they have doubts on how to find the required information?
- will users know where is the navigation and where the content?
- do you provide a search function so that people can search through your site for certain key terms?

Let's look closer at the navigation structure you use on your site:
- do you have text links or are still the old-fashioned image-links the only way to navigate through your page?
- in case you use hierarchical navigation structures, do you make the hierarchy really clear?

Now have a look at your website's texts:
- do you illustrate texts with images so that having a quick look at a list of articles I could say right away which article deals with which topic?
- do you present very important keywords in bold letters so that skimming the text I can get its content?
- do you use paragraphs to structure your information?
- do you provide short introductions to tell briefly about the content of a text?
- do you use topic sentences to tell what each paragraph is about?

Now that we have analyzed our navigation structure and our texts' presentation, let's talk about search engines.

After all, you run your website because you want to be found on Google, Live, yahoo etc. - but how can you make it easier for these search engines to list your site in their index? I won't go into much detail since this tutorial should not focus on seo only, just make sure you fulfill these three requirements:
1. Provide new, interesting content related to your area of interest on a regular basis
2. Make your navigation as clear as possible (see step 2)
3. Use different and keyword-rich titles on each page, acompanied by a unique description of each page's content

These are the first steps (on-page) you can take to have your website indexed ... then there are so-called off-page optimization methods that can further push your website's ranking, let's talk about some aspects related to this in step 6.