If you are building or scaling your business, your website is one of your most powerful assets. It’s your digital storefront, your branding hub, and often the first impression you make on potential customers. And in that landscape, alt text is one of those details that can either elevate your brand visibility or leave opportunities on the table.

In this article, we’ll unpack what alt text is, why it matters, and how businesses can leverage it to maximize both accessibility and SEO. By the end, you’ll see how a few words of thoughtful description can help you win more traffic, trust, and conversions.

What Exactly Is Alt Text?

Alt text — short for alternative text — is the written description added to images on a webpage. Its primary purpose is to provide context when the image cannot be displayed or when a visitor is using a screen reader. But beyond accessibility, alt text plays a huge role in how search engines understand your content.

Here’s something that might blow your mind: Google’s sophisticated AI still can’t perfectly understand images without textual context. Search engines are also blind in a way without alt-text. While they can crawl and index your written words, they, however, can’t “see” your images. Without alt text, that valuable image content remains invisible to them. By adding descriptive alt text, you essentially translate your images into searchable language that boosts your overall SEO.

So while it may seem like a small technical detail, alt text is really a strategic tool.

Why Should I Care About Alt Text?

Here is why you should care :

Accessibility Builds Trust and Loyalty

Inclusivity is no longer optional. Many potential customers rely on screen readers due to visual impairments. If your website is missing alt text, you’re excluding a portion of your audience. By simply writing clear descriptions for your images, you show empathy and respect. And that builds loyalty.

 Alt Text Fuels Your SEO

Search engines can’t interpret images the way humans can. By writing optimized alt text, you’re essentially whispering in Google’s ear: “Here’s what this picture is about.” This extra context can help your pages rank higher, especially when your alt text includes relevant keywords naturally.

For entrepreneurs, this is free organic traffic you can’t afford to miss. Every visitor who finds you through search is one step closer to becoming a customer.

 Improves User Experience Beyond the Screen

Technical failures happen more than you think. Sometimes images don’t load. Maybe the user has a slow internet connection. Perhaps your image hosting service is experiencing technical difficulties. Sometimes corporate firewalls block certain image types or external resources. In mobile environments with limited data plans, users might disable image loading entirely to conserve bandwidth.

When that happens, alt text ensures users still understand the context. Instead of being confused by a blank square, they still get the full story.

In other words, alt text acts as your safety net. It guarantees your content communicates effectively even when technology fails.

Legal Compliance and Avoiding Risk

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide have some form of vision impairment. That’s roughly one in four people on this planet.

In many regions, there are accessibility laws in place. These laws require websites to be usable by people with disabilities. Failing to be compliant can put a business at legal risk.

In 2023 alone, there were over 4,000 website accessibility lawsuits filed in the United States. That’s more than ten lawsuits every single day. Companies like Target, Netflix, and Domino‘s have faced high-profile lawsuits specifically related to website accessibility issues. Domino’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

These lawsuits are completely preventable. Simply adding alt text is one of the easiest ways to safeguard your business and stay compliant with regulations.

Most startups and small businesses with limited funds do not have the luxury of paying hefty settlements, so as site owners, it is best to get this remedy as soon as possible.

How to Write Effective Alt Text

Now that you know why it matters, let’s talk about how to write alt text that actually works.

 Be Descriptive, Not Robotic

Instead of writing something vague like “image” or “photo,” describe what the picture shows. For example, instead of:

  “Dog”

  “Golden retriever puppy playing with a red ball in a park”

The second example not only paints a clearer picture for users but also gives search engines more context.

 Keep It Concise

Alt text is not the place for lengthy sentences.

Aim for one short, clear description — usually under 125 characters. Screen readers cut off longer text, so brevity ensures clarity.

 Use Keywords Naturally

If your target keyword fits naturally, use it. For example, if your keyword is “eco-friendly water bottle,” and your image shows that product, your alt text could read:

  “Eco-friendly stainless steel water bottle on a wooden desk”

Avoid keyword stuffing. Forcing phrases like “eco-friendly water bottle” into every image alt text looks spammy and hurts your SEO.

 Skip Redundancy

You don’t need to write “image of” or “picture of” in your alt text.

Screen readers already announce that it’s an image. Jump straight into the description.

 Prioritize Meaningful Images

Not every single image needs detailed alt text. Decorative elements (like background patterns or design flourishes) can have empty alt attributes (`alt=””`) so they don’t clutter the experience for screen readers. Focus your energy on product images, infographics, charts, and photos that add real value.

Use Cases for Alt Text

So, how do entrepreneurs apply this practically? Let’s look at a few scenarios.

E-commerce Businesses

If you sell products online, alt text is your silent salesperson. Well-written descriptions make your products discoverable in Google Images, which drives buying intent traffic straight to your store.

For example, instead of:

  “Shoes”

  “Women’s black leather ankle boots with side zipper”

That extra detail improves both search visibility and conversion. Despite its simplicity, alt text remains one of the most overlooked aspects of web development.

Content Creators and Coaches

If you publish blogs, webinars, or guides, alt text ensures your visuals (charts, screenshots, promotional graphics) contribute to SEO. It also makes your content more accessible to a broader audience, expanding your reach.

Startups and Small Businesses

When you’re building awareness on a budget, every ounce of organic visibility matters. Alt text is one of the cheapest SEO wins available. It helps your site compete with bigger players who may overlook this detail.

Personal Branding for Entrepreneurs

If you’re building a personal brand through photos, speaking events, or media features, alt text ensures your image-based content contributes to your discoverability. Imagine someone searching for “entrepreneur keynote speaker Singapore” — if your event photo has the right alt text, you could appear.

Common Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make with Alt Text

Despite its simplicity, many entrepreneurs miss the mark. Here are mistakes to avoid:

 Keyword stuffing: Writing alt text like “alt text alt text entrepreneur SEO alt text” doesn’t fool Google.

 Being too vague: “Business image” doesn’t add value.

 Forgetting brand consistency: Use alt text to reinforce your brand voice subtly.

 Ignoring charts and infographics: Data visuals need alt text too, or you lose SEO and accessibility benefits.

Final Thoughts: Don’t Overlook the Small Things

As entrepreneurs, it’s tempting to focus only on the big, flashy strategies — product launches, ad campaigns, scaling operations. But sometimes, it’s the quiet, overlooked details that make the difference between being found and being forgotten.

Alt text may look small on the surface, but its ripple effects touch accessibility, SEO, brand reputation, and even legal compliance. By investing just a few extra minutes to write thoughtful alt text, you’re investing in a better experience for your customers and a stronger foundation for your business.

Remember the 2.2 billion people with disabilities; though they may face visual challenges, they nonetheless represent real people with real purchasing power.

So next time you upload an image, don’t just leave that alt text box blank. Use it as a chance to improve your visibility and show your customers that you care.

It’s often the little things that make the biggest impact or sink a mighty ship. If you want professional help optimizing your digital presence, drop us a note as we specialize in strategies that ensure every detail of your online presence is working for you and not against you, including alt text.

The geographic distribution of website visitors today makes it important for a site to be able to deliver content reliably and without delay; otherwise, a visitor will leave for another one in a snap. CDNs help eliminate poor download experience by providing faster site downloads, so businesses must adopt them, especially those serving global audiences — even if you’re not speaking to the world, having one is still good.

CDN comes with lots of benefits that affect different areas of a website, directly or indirectly. These are some:

1 Quicker Website Loading Times

One thing you’ll notice almost immediately after setting up CDN service is how fast your web pages load now. What happens here is that CDNs cache (store temporarily) copies of websites on their servers worldwide. Every time someone visits your site, instead of pulling information from just one server, it pulls data from the closest server possible in order to reduce latency time, therefore speeding up page display – which leads to higher customer satisfaction rates and lower bounce rates, too.

When people get tired of waiting for a web page to download, they close it and move on. This may result in a loss of potential revenue for website owners. So you do not want to have such a problem and instead have as many happy visitors as you can.

2 Increased Reliability For Websites

With many CDN servers having copies of your website, you won’t have sleepless nights wondering whether your website is showing up! CDNs come equipped with strong failover capabilities and redundancy features, so if something goes wrong at one place, there’s always another copy somewhere else waiting to be shown.

By distributing content across multiple servers, CDNs reduce the chances of server failures or network congestion which could cause downtimes. This ensures that even if you get a spike in visitors or some hosts go offline unexpectedly, users can still access your site continuously without interruptions hence keeping business on track all day every day – if necessary.

3 Aids With Higher Rankings On Search Engines

Site speed is an important ranking factor for search engines like Google and Bing etc., because it affects user experience.

When it comes to user experience, search engine algorithms don’t take prisoners! So webmasters should do everything possible within reason (and perhaps beyond) to make their sites perform well in terms of loading times which will help them rank higher up on SERPs. In other words, people whose websites are not fast enough need to start worrying about this issue right now because, before they know it, their competitors might have already overtaken them thanks to better CDN optimization techniques.

Apart from that, many CDNs include SSL/TLS encryption — another SEO ranking signal considered important by Google.

4 Support for Rich Media Content

Nowadays, websites often contain high-res images, videos, and interactive elements. These content can take up a lot of bandwidth and time to download. CDNs help to efficiently deliver these assets to users so they can be played back smoothly over different devices and network conditions. Whether it’s product images on an eCommerce site or video content heavy blog post – a CDN can massively improve user experience by reducing buffering times and generally speeding up content delivery.

5 Enhanced Security

Most CDNs come with built-in security features. They include security features such as web application firewalls (WAF), and bot mitigation. However, CDN excels in protecting against a DDoS attack which can crash a server. These functions help protect your web server against malicious attacks, thus making you feel confident about your safety online.

With the constantly evolving landscape of cyber threats, a web server without a CDN can be vulnerable. Companies are encouraged to invest in a CDN that has strong security measures in place if they want to keep their company’s digital assets safe from harm.

6 Scalability

Working on a pay as you used model, CDN can quickly scale up without any downtime. With its elastic computing, load balancing and traffic routing capabilities, a CDN is ready to take on any sudden spikes in traffic on a fly.

CDNs have the ability to scale resources automatically when demand rises, ensuring that even during peak periods, the site remains responsive.

7 Compliance and Regulatory Requirements

Finally, as data privacy laws continue tightening globally. The transfer of data outside a country’s jurisdiction can be an issue, like in the recent TikTok case with the US government. This is where a CDN can be useful if they have servers in the same jurisdiction where data is being collected. In the future, a country’s protection rules may require businesses storing customer information outside certain jurisdictions to comply with specific regulations, which can be facilitated by having some or all parts of their infrastructure reside within those boundaries provided by CDNs.

8 Reduce cost

As more people access your website, you will have no option but to add more servers, which could mean expensive investments into additional hardware. This could be costly as you would also need manpower to help manage things. Leveraging a CDN provider can defray infrastructure and operational costs. Working with CDNs can also help cut down on deployment time together.

In conclusion, integrating a CDN into your website’s infrastructure does not only speed things up or reduce server loads; it also allows businesses to provide frictionless digital encounters that foster customer trust, increase participation and ultimately drive bottom line.

As it spreads across the world, governments are implementing measures to “flatten the curve”. As such, companies are instructed to allow employees to work from home.

During this time, face to face meetings is also kept to a minimum to starve the virus of new hosts. Remote meetings via webinars are now the preferred mode of any communications.

While we do our part to “flatten the curve”, we must not forget about the cybercriminals. They are still around despite the broader threat of Covid19.  

Companies can essentially do a few things to improve their position. They could modernize things, enhance the way of working, better protect themselves, and get ready for an uptick in business when the virus passes.

#1 Improve connectivity security

With employees working remotely, companies would want to improve their cyber defenses. Companies should consider deploying a firewall and VPN solution if they have not already done so. A VPN will prevent any “man in the middle” attacks.

#2 Improve endpoint security

Companies should also consider deploying an anti-malware solution on all remote machines in the event a cyber attacker is successful in deploying a malware payload. With an anti-malware solution in place, the malware can be detected and isolated.

Any anti-malware should also include an Endpoint Detection and Reporting component (EDR). With the added EDR functionality, companies can identify the origin of the attack the path it took, and the systems affected. This information will facilitate the investigative work of forensics experts. It will also reduce the financial cost of involving these experts, as their expertise is not cheap.

#3 Minimizing information loss

Finally, if companies are afraid of sensitive information being leaked, we can help in preventing that from happening.

If there is a data breach and sensitive personal data is leaked to the public, there will be an investigation by regulators. Pending the outcome of the findings, there would be a fine by the regulators. The size of the penalty will depend on the effort made by the company to improve its process in handling personal data, and what measures and controls they have put in place to minimize a data breach.

#4 Employee cyber awareness training

Beyond implementing solutions, companies could also explore running training programs to empower their employees.

One could be in the are of cyber defense and get ready to dash out of the gates when the economy picks up.

We provide cybersecurity employee awareness to empower employees against a cyber attack. We will convert them from being unwitting victims to alert defenders against any cyber onslaught.

#5 Sales training

For the sales team, we can also provide sales training to help them deliver better outcomes through better sales presentations and customer engagement.

Customers are getting savvier, and they expect to deal with a salesperson to be equally apted. Customers may be seeking a solution to solve a problem, but they eventually buy into the confidence of the service provider through the salesperson representing them.

#6 Lead generating website

A crisis is always an excellent time to slow down, review and improve on things (i.e., enhance internal processes, attend training, etc.) you usually never had the time to do.

With the impact of Covid19 weighing down on businesses, this would be a good time to modernize and sharpen the sword.

One of the things we can help with is your website. Your website has a bigger job to do rather than just looking pretty. We can not only help empower it to generate more leads but bring in more relevant leads.

Do drop us a note to see how we can make it happen for you.

One of the first few essential tasks that you, as a business owner, need to do is to decide on a brand quickly.

A brand is a crucial element of your business. It is the first thing your potential customer will come to know about your business.

However, sad to say, most brands are not well-conceived. This leads to issues down the road

Like everything crucial, all aspects of it need to be considered before executing it.

Below are four reasons why you need to get your branding done right from the get-go.

Brand Association

Have you ever encountered an ambiguous brand and wonder what they are promoting?

The ambiguous brand does not adequately convey the service or product they are offering. It leaves its audience wondering what the business is all about.

As a brand owner, the ambiguous brand may have significance for you, but from an audience perspective, the brand is unclear. Your audience would have to take an extra step to figure the business behind the brand. In a time strap world where everyone with multiple priorities and choices, would rather just ignore the strange brand then do further research on it. Hence you have just lost a potential client.

As a new brand owner, one of your immediate priorities is to help your customers understand your business and recall your brand.

When these audiences who have seen your brand and what you can offer, ideally, they would be able to recall your brand and, after that, consider your brand in their purchase decision.

A purchasing decision is very much similar to a beauty contest.

If you are not one of the contestants, you will not even be considered for the grand prize.

So it is crucial to make it easier for your audience to understand what your brand stands for.

Brand Essence

What makes brands like Apple, Coca Cola, and Nike stand out in a world of myriad choices?

Brand essence.

Just like you as a person stands for something. A brand can likewise either be neutral or made to stand for something. And if that something you stand for resonates with your potential buyer, he/she is more likely to purchase your product over the competition.

Hence to give your buyer a nudge to purchase your product over the competition, you should craft a brand essence to sway your buyer’s purchasing decision to your brand.

Rebranding

From time to time, you read or hear of companies embarking on a rebranding exercise.

These rebranding exercises are not only disruptive but costly.

First of all, all existing hard-earned brand equity, online and offline, will be lost. A new brand identity has to be built. Existing marketing materials have to be discarded and a new set of materials crafted.

Secondly, to get everyone to buy into the new brand, a lot of public relations and advertising is needed to communicate this change. This change can create confusion for those who have missed out on any of your rebranding campaigns.

Thirdly, your hard-won fans would feel let down and might even abandon your brand and move over to a competitive brand.

Rebranding can be avoided if you get it right from the get-go.

Competition

Like yourselves, your competition is constantly thinking of ways to strengthen and grow their business.

They are not static. Your competitors are always on a lookout for an edge to beat the competition.

A brand is just one tool in their arsenal of edges they can leverage on. With everything else being equal (i.e. features and pricing), a brand could be a deciding and winning factor.

So shouldn’t you likewise leverage on this edge?

Branding, if done right from the get-go will save you ton of headaches down the road.

Let us work with you to get it right.

Shall we have a conversation on how we can help you with your brand and craft an edge for your brand?

Your brand name is the first ambassador of your business. You want to get it right to give a good impression.

Easy to remember

If your brand is easy to remember, it will also be easy to recall. If your brand is difficult to remember, it will also be tricky to recall.

Hence, you want to make sure your brand name is easy to remember. This is why Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, selected the name “Alibaba” for his company as people are familiar with it.

Originality

Just like your person and name, your brand should also be unique and original as much as you can get away with. This makes it easier for others to identify you but not necessarily easy to remember you.

One of the ways to achieve an original brand name is to take a subset of two words to form a new word. For example, billionaire Bill Gates’ company “Microsoft” is a combination of the word “micro-computers” and the word ‘software”.

Another popular brand name made up of two words would be “Netflix”. an American slang for the word “movie’. Netflix’s model of delivering movie content was using the Internet; hence the portion of the word “Net” makes sense.

Relevance

While choosing a name that is easy to remember and recall, it should also have relevance to your business. Most brands today like Adidas, Amazon, Google, Nike, Yahoo etc, were not obvious if you have encountered them during their earlier years.

On the flip side, good brand names would be brands like Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Upon hearing these names, you quickly would understand that the former is selling burgers, and the latter is in the business of selling fried chicken.

These works for search engines, too, as when a person types in words like burgers and chicken, the two brands, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, with the keywords as part of their brand, will show up respectively on search engine result pages.

Hence it is good to have keywords that relate to your business as part of your brand name.

Brand name availability

In today’s contact, a brand cannot be selected without any regard to its availability as a domain and on social media platforms. As more and more people start to embrace the Internet, you will find good domain names quickly taken up.

If you do not do a check, you will find yourself driving traffic to a domain or on social media platforms that you do not own.

Hence when selecting a brand name, these are three of the most fundamentals you must not forget to consider, unless you want to challenge yourself to do a rebranding exercise later on.

If you need any assistance in establishing your brand, do feel free to drop us a line.

Beyond the initial website creation effort, a whole sleuth of activities (i.e. link up to search engines, website optimization) needs to be carried out. Thereafter, the site will go into maintenance mode (i.e software updates, new developments) to keep it running. This is something the website owner needs to fully understand and factor in.

In this post, we will examine the pros and cons of outsourcing a website’s development and mainteance for a small business owner. Below are some essential factors that need to be considered when starting on creating your own website. In this comparison, we take it DIY as the business owner managing the site by his/her ownself.

Complexity of your site. If the website is a simple informational website, this is something the business owner can consider to undertake his/her own self. However, on the website, there probably would be a sign up form to collect visitor’s email addresses, this is a security issue. A website with a sign up form is susceptible to SQL injection attacks. The attack would allow the attacker to gain direct access to the backend website contacts database. This could result in a personal data leak and attract the attention of the authorities. .

Time to market. All content management solution has a learning curve. As the website increases in functionality, so will be the learning curve. So depending on how much time the business owners has to focus on the website, otherwise it is prudent to simply outsource the development and maintenance of the website to a third-party vendor.

Frequency of change. Content changes from time to time. It is a minor text change, the small business owners can undertake the changes themselves. However if changes are in the form of enhancing the website, then considering a third party outsourcing provider would be the recommended way to go as it will consume a lot of the business owner’s time to research, implement, test and monitor these changes.

Frequency of updates. Business owners need to understand that all software needs to be update from time to time. Each updates need to be reviewed and updated. Once updated the website needs to be checked to see if anything is impacted by the updates. This takes time, depending on how many additional functionality was added onto the base website.

Data confidentiality. Data confidentially is very important especially when private data is concerned. Once a breach happens, data owners are obligated to inform the relevant authorities. Ideally the data owners (i.e business owner) should be the first to know of such a breach and not be the last to know, so you can better manage the breach.

In this respect, business owners need to fully understand how to protect their databases. If not, it would be best for them to outsource the development and maintenance of the website to third party vendors who would be in a better place to protect the data.

Note even though your website is hosted on a third-party hosting provider, ultimately the business owner is still responsible for the safeguarding of the personal data provided by it’s users.

Cost. Cost is always at the top of the mind of a small business owner. He/she is always looking at ways to minimize the cost of operations. Doing it internally could be cheaper financially, however, it takes time off on other operational issue. This is something the business owner as to weigh carefully.

As you can see from above, the decision is not a straightforward one for the small business owner.  The final decision to do it in-house or outsource, would also depend on the resources available and the environment he/she is working in – is speed to market important?

If you need further clarification, do drop us a note and shall we have a conversation before you embark on this important decision.

One of the decisions you have to make is to choose a hosting provider.

With so many hosting providers in the market, you will be spoilt for choice on which web hosting vendor to go with.

While finances are always crucial for a budding business, you should, however, not make it a primary consideration when selecting a hosting provider.

Below are some noteworthy considerations to help you in your selection process.

#1 Audience

One of the critical questions you need to ask yourself is – where are the bulk of your website audience?

Ideally, your hosting provider should be in the same country, if not in the same city, as your audience. Why is having the web host provider near to your audience important?

With a webserver closer to your site visitors and not having to make travel a longer distance, the round trip time for the webserver to download the web pages will be quicker.

If your audience is located in multiple areas, you would want to work with a vendor who has web servers in those locations too.

#2 cPanel

The term “cPanel’ is short for “control panel”.

As its name implies, it is an application that allows you to manage and control your website and allocated disk space.

The cPanel is where you will set up domains, install the desired Content Management System (CMS), configure emails, and other activities to get you going.

The cPanel is something you would have to familiarize yourself with as you manage your website and emails.

While the cPanel is a de facto standard with most providers, you might just want to confirm it with the hosting provider. Some hosting providers like to customize it or enhance the cPanel.

It is best to go with the standard cPanel. Do ask your hosting provider to share a screenshot of the cPanel if you can.

Why is this important?

Having a standard cPanel is vital as it allows you to easily navigate the interface. With once glance, you know where the respective icons are, and if it is missing, you can quickly notice it.

With a customized new cPanel interface, you would have to familiarize yourself with it. If, after using it for some time, you discover the panel is missing a function as a staging area. You might regret using that web hosting provider.

#3 Content management system

One thing you don’t want to take for granted is the CMS you are planning to use. After all, this is where you will be spending most of your time.

If you are planning to use WordPress, you want to confirm whether your hosting provider supports it. Similarly, if you prefer to use a CMS like Weebly, you would likewise wish to verify your web host provider supports it.

You don’t’ want a rude shock after signing up with a hosting provider and realize they do not support the CMS you are planning to use.

#4 SSL Setup

SSL is fast becoming a requirement for all websites as search engines seek to improve web security over the web. A website that does not have the secure HTTPS protocol will have a lower search result ranking over one that has.

With some hosting provider, SSL functionality could come at an additional cost, while with others, it could be part of the hosting plan. If it is the former, you want to confirm what is the cost of the SSL.

Also, do check how easy it would be to install the SSL certificates. Will they help you with the installation? If not, is there an easy to follow guide to get you going?

#5 Disk space

Most web host providers have different hosting plans with a different set of features. One of them is disk space. The plan you eventually choose will be influenced by it.

Before you look at the various hosting plans, you would want to have some idea of how much disk space you might require.

Besides hosting your website, most web host providers also allow you to host your emails.

If you decide to host your emails with the same provider, it will consume some disk space. Assuming you have three people in your team. If you allocated 2GB (assuming 2GB is enough) to each user, you would have used up 6GB of disk space. Beyond the users, you would also have generic emails like an “enquiry email“, a “privacy email” and/or “marketing email”. Assuming 2GB is enough between them. In total, you would then require 8GB just for emails.

#6 Number of emails & websites

Another significant limitation is the number of email addresses and websites you can set up under each plan. If a basic plan has a limit of 3 email addresses, and you have a business with four active partners, you would minimally require a plan that can support four email addresses.

Similarly, with the number of websites, you plan to have.  

These are factors you need to be aware of when choosing a suitable plan.

#7 Support

Support is a major consideration, more so than pricing itself. Though it is not apparent in any of the hosting plans, you will come to understand its significance as you run into issues.

As you manage your website, there is a good chance you would need some technical support from your service provider. For instance, as you or your webmaster has no access to the web server itself, you would need their assistance to take some action on the webserver on your behalf.

During such times, their timely response is critical in resolving issues quickly. You do not want to have to

A website is a public-facing thing. If there are any discrepancies or malfunctions on it, you would want to fix it quickly and wait for a few days to get things fixed. You do not wish your issues to be discovered by the public and your potential customers.

Hence do check with your hosting provider on their service level. You can validate it on third-party review sites for their support quality.

#8 Price

Finally, price, a matter that concerns all business owners.

The price, though in itself, is an important criterion, it should, however, never be a primary consideration. It should instead be the last criteria to consider, as there are more significant factors than price.

Things like quality customer service are priceless as it would impact you when your website is not working well.

Not sure about the above, do drop us a line if you need further assistance.

The primary mission of the search engine is to create a good user experience for those who use their search capabilities. To achieve a satisfying experience, a search engine has to consider many factors.

However, these factors can be broken down into three broad categories.

Relevant content

Long before Google, there were already many other search engines on the Internet. Search engines like Alta Vista, ask Jeeves, Excite, etc. were household names back then lie how Google is today. However, while these companies understood the importance of search engines on the Internet, they did not understand the power of quality relevant content. Many a time, during those days, when you search on these platforms, the results that come back were disappointing.

Hence when a search engine (i.e., Google) that provided more relevant content came along, users migrated to the new platform. Users want quality relatable results. Being able to provide appropriate quality results is vital. If you do it right, your visitors will come.

Quality results, in turn, depend on the right keywords and relevant content. With good content, visitors will spend more time on the webpage, and they might even share the page out. These actions are signals to search engines that the webpage has some relevance to the user and potential users.

Download speed

With more and more users using their mobile users to surf the Internet on the go, download speed becomes increasingly important.

Download speed over mobile devices is typically slower compared to devices physically connected (i.e.,LAN) to the Internet. With the already slow connection, any webpage that adds to the slowness of the download will irk the user. This slow download would constitute a poor experience in the eyes of search engines. The website will be penalized by being ranked lower to a comparatively faster website. Hence, optimizing a website for faster download is critical.

It is imperative to check on your website download speed from time to time, especially when adding something new to it. The newly added image, functionality, may impact your site download performance.

Secure website

As cybercriminal activities intensify, search engines are increasingly putting more emphasis on website security. A new, more secure transmission protocol emerged because of this concern – HTTPS. With HTTPS in place, information that is transmitted between the web server and the client desktop or device is made more secure through encryption. Sites that run the HTTPS protocol have their domain name preceded by HTTPS in their URL.

In 2018, search engines like Google took it a step further by displaying a little padlock beside the URL of the website. Google even went further by providing warnings of unsecured webpages they are about to visit, to its users.

While doing all of the above three things doesn’t guarantee you will appear on the first page on any search engine result page, it will, however, provide you with the assurance that you are in line with the search engines’ mandate.

With over 100+ ranking factors to optimize, getting the above right will serve as a good foundation for your optimization effort to rank higher within the search engines.