Ok, we know page speed is important because fast sites equal happy users. And from my last post we know how to run a test for page speed. But the big question remains is how does one go about optimizing their site using the feedback from the speed tests?

I’m glad you asked!

From the page speed tests you’ll see a number of different criteria with some suggestions. Here are the 3 most common suggestions you’ll see.

GZIP Compression:

One of the most common suggestions is GZIP Compression. This one sounds technical but its actually pretty easy. First you have to make sure that your server is configured to run GZIP compression. You can find out by using this gzip test. If the response comes back no.. then you need to contact your hosting company and ask them if they can enable it by compiling mod_deflate in apache.

Once gzip compression is enabled on the server you’ll need to initiate it by modifying your .htaccess file. You can add your handler a couple of different ways.

# compress all text & html:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

Or

#compress certain file types by extension:
<Files *.html>SetOutputFilter DEFLATE</Files>

Apache doesn’t make it easy to include multiple types. You can force it by having multiple sections, one for each extension. The “proper” way uses “FilesMatch” to match files by a regular expression and would look something like this (if you wanted to compress html, php,txt, css, js, gif, jpg & png)

# compress html, php,txt, css, js, gif, jpg & png:
<FilesMatch "\.(php|html|txt|css|js|gif|jpg)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>
# END Compression


For a better and more complete explanation on how GZIP Compression works as well as another explanation on how to implement gzip compression check out this great article.

Just by adding gzip compression to this website, I decreased the load time by more than 50%.

Compiling Stylesheets and Remove Excess Whitespace.

If you have multiple stylesheets then a good practice is to compile all of the css files into one single css file. Just copy and paste the code from each stylesheet into the compiled one. And be sure to comment the beginning and end each sheet section. Once compiled you may want to go through and clean up excess whites pace. In the old days css code was formatted like this…

body {
font-size: 62.5%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */
font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
background: #d5d6d7 url('images/kubrickbgcolor.jpg');
color: #333;
text-align: center;
}
#page {
background-color: white;
border: 1px solid #959596;
text-align: left;
}
#header {
background: #73a0c5 url('images/kubrickheader.jpg') no-repeat bottom center;
}

This code could be tightened up quite a bit and would look something like this…

body {font-size: 62.5%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */ font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; background: #d5d6d7 url('images/kubrickbgcolor.jpg'); color: #333; text-align: center; }
#page { background-color: white; border: 1px solid #959596; text-align: left; }
#header { background: #73a0c5 url('images/kubrickheader.jpg') no-repeat bottom center; }

By cleaning up the whitespace of the theme stylesheet on Search Friendly Web Design, I reduced the file from over 500 lines to under 80 lines and shaved a few milliseconds off my page speed.

Compiling JavaScript Files and Move Them Down Under

The last common optimization technique is to compile JavaScript files in the same manner as we just did with the CSS files. Once you’ve compiled your several JS files into one, move the JS call from the header down to the footer.

By optimizing your site in these 3 ways you will reduce the total number of http requests and at the same time compress those few files to produce optimum page speed.

Page loading speeds are important to websites, especially now that page speed is part of the Google search algorithm. To analyze the page speed or load time of your website, here are 3 free and easy ways to analyze your websites page speed.

WebsiteOptimization.com

The tool I’ve been using for more than 6 years is the WebsiteOptimization.com page speed analysis tool.  Simply enter the url of the site you want to analyze. You’ll get a diagnosis or output of object size totals, external objects, page objects, download times and recommendations to help speed up your websites load time

Google Webmaster Tools

If you have an account with Google Webmaster Tools you can find a Performance Overiew which details how fast your site is.  And you’ll also find a list of HTML suggestions to help increase load speeds. To find this data, login to your GWT account and under the Labs drop menu you’ll find a link to Site Performance. If you don’t have a webmaster tools set it.. you should go check it ASAP.

FireBug for Firefox

FireBug is a plugin for FireFox Browser. The way I’ve always set it up was install FireBug then install Google Page Speed which installs into FireBug.  Once installed, open the page you want to analyze and then click the little bug in the lower right corner of your FireFox browser. Look under Page Speed > Performance Tab then click the analyze button to receive and output of your score out 100 and suggestions on how to fix or speed up your page load times.

There you have it, 3 simple ways to analyze your website page speed and get recommendations on how to clean things up and speed up your sites load time.

Next Step Speed Optimization

Now that we have our page speed analysis and suggestions it’s time to get our hands dirty with a little bit of Web Page Speed Optimization.

According to Google Webmaster Blog, Page Speed is now part of the Google Search Algorithm.  So what does that mean exactly? It means that if you have a website that loads slow you get less points and for real fast sites… more points.

I’ve always considered Page Speed to more of a usability trait not so much a part of search engine optimization but I can see Google’s side of things.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites. — Full Article Here.

So what does the Page Speed signal mean for webmasters and website owners? First off it’s nothing to panic about because overall Page Speed isn’t going to tank your rankings if you have a really slow loading site. Second you should run a Page Speed test against your site and then third… follow the recommendations of the Page Speed Analysis and clean things up to make your site pages load faster.

Google Also stated… “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.”

Personally I’m glad Google added Page Speed to their search ranking algorithm because overall I hope it signals some poorly designed or extremely outdated websites to clean up their act and make for a better internet.

Google Page Rank is the  number or score assigned to each of your websites pages.  Google Page Rank is a key metric to monitor but should not  be the main focal point of an SEO Campaign. About a month ago Google made a major change to Webmaster Tools by removing all PageRank data.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” states Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” (Source: WebProNews)

Many SEO’s believe that this move is Google’s way of trying to indirectly combat the rampant paid linking problem which Google created by introducing PageRank. In reality a good portion of the PageRank algorithm is based on links from external websites.  My perspective is that anyone with a little know-how can build up a good page rank with effective link building.  It is my opinion that the foundation of a search friendly site; the design, usability and overall optimization of said website is far more important.

Page Rank Won’t Drive Traffic

Let us say for instance that the goal of your website(s) is to sell products. To do this you need customers. Page rank won’t bring you customers if your customers can’t find you which is why I stress solid keyword research and thorough page optimization in front of page rank. A site needs to show up for the terms people are searching for.

Once they find you, having a clean design and easy to use website will keep your customers on your sites and hopefully buying your products. If your site doesn’t make sense and is not intuitive to use then those potential customers are likely to go away frustrated and buy somewhere else and there is nothing your Google Page Rank can do to change that.

When I search the web I frequently find websites in the #1 search listing that have a lower Page Rank than the subsequent competitive listing. Just because you have a PR4 doesn’t mean you can’t get beat in the SERP’s by competing sites with a PR3 or lower. With that said, I like to view page rank as more of a success indicator not the driving force behind an SEO campaign.

A Good Foundation Will Foster A Good Page Rank

So instead of focusing on your Google Page Rank, focus on building a good clean website that is search engine friendly, user friendly and intuitive.  Perform thorough keyword research, optimize it and be proactive with a long term SEO strategy. If you do all this a good page rank is sure to follow. And remember that in the big picture page rank simply measures the quantity and quality of the links pointing to your website.

Need help with your search engine optimization strategy? We can help. Review our search engine marketing services or contact us today.

This morning I came across this article at  SitePro News  entitled “5 Google Tools For Researching Your Market“.

The 5 Google Tools they listed were..

• Tool 1 – Related Searches And Wonder Wheel
• Tool 2 – Adwords Keyword Tool
• Tool 3 – Google Trends
• Tool 4 – Google Alerts
• Tool 5 – Google Websearch

Visit their article on their blog for full details and explanations of why/how these 5 Goolge Tools can be used effectively for Market Research.

I personally was surprised to not see Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools in this list. I’d like to know why the author of this article didn’t include these tools but with the information I have now I would have included Analytics and Webmaster tools over Google Alerts and Websearch.

Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics can offer some very insightful information about how your website is performing in the market you are competing in.  For well rounded market research you need data about the market plus your performance in that market so you can know where SEO efforts are needed most within your site.

I think the article should be entitled “7 Google Tools for Market Research” and just  include Google Anaytics and Google Webmaster Tools.

Overall the article is a good one and we’re glad to share it, hope you can take something away from it.

Are there any other Google Tools you use for market research? If so we’d love to hear about them and we’d like to hear your opinion about the use of these tools for market research.

This article is part of a series that I’m working to serve as a beginners guide to SEO and search engine friendly website design.

Keeping your website code clean and simple will create a good foundation for a successful search engine friendly website. I’ve worked on too many sites that are just table nightmares with massive amounts of images and tons of missing end tags. All these items mentioned can really degrade how well spiders crawl your pages.

Clean Code

When it comes it to writing code for any website… it should be considered common sense to have clean code. What does clean code mean.. there are a  few things, like making sure that…

• All tags are properly formatted
• All tags have the necessary closing tag
• Code should validate

Simple Code

Being that clean code should be common sense… I think that for good search engine friendly websites, the code should also be very simple and free of overlapping styles as well as being as short and succinct as possible. So how does one achieve this css zen? By utilizing and controlling the basic formatting tags of body, paragraph, h1,h2,h3 and a to do the heavy lifting. For this very reason is why Wordpress is so search engine friendly…  because most good themes have tableless site structure comprised of div id & class tags and use the p,h1, h2 tags to style 90% of the content keeping it very clean & simple.

Well Commented Code

Now having well commented code isn’t neccesarily a search friendly web design tip… but more of a courtesy as you may not always be the one working on a given site. So I find it extremely helpful in maintaining the integrity of the code through future web masters when it is well commented. Plus I think well commented code makes it easier to work with when having to make a quick tweak in the dashboard editor inside Wordpress. I probably over comment my html, php and css files but in the end I know that if someone other than me is working on the code that they will very easily be able to find there way around.

Do you have anything to add on the coding aspect relative to search engine friendly website design? If so share your comments below.

This morning I decided to go check the backlinks for a clients’ site and to my surprise their backlinks had dwindled from over 600 to 78 and most importantly their Yahoo Directory & DMOZ listings were gone also… I checked in Google Webmaster Tools and via the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

So what happened to all the backlinks?  After doing a little more investigating I found a thread on the Digital Point Forum stating that the new version of Google Webmaster Tools would have all my backwords links. So I went to my GMT account.. clicked the  “Check out our new look” made my way over to links are and there they were. All of them including the Yahoo! and DMOZ backlinks as well.

So if you using the link:www.domain.com command or the old version of webmaster tools you are most likely seeing the same thing I saw. So go check out the new version of Google Webmaster Tools and you’ll likely find your missing backlinks over there.

Found this on Twitter and wanted to share the video here…. What are the factors that go into determining the PageRank of a Twitter page? (@mattcutts on video)

Click here to view the embedded video.

I just finished a successful week at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. While traveling home to Southern California on the Amtrak train.. I had some to reflect on what on what I took away from the conference. The hot topic was social media and social networking.

Social Media Break Down

Social media is a user centric platform that connects people around the globe for the purposes of sharing and discussing information.

Social media can be broken down into several different categories.. each with it’s own unique purposes applications.

• Social News: Blogs, Podcasts, Livecasts
• Social Sharing: You Tube Videos and Flickr Photos
• Social Networks (personal & professional): Face Book, Linked In
• Social Bookmarks: Digg, Deliciou
• Social Micro Blogging: Twitter

Social Media & Search Engine Marketing

Define your audience.
Defining your audience is the most important step in any marketing campaign.. don’t just jump in headfirst and start publishing before figuring out who your readers are, because the audience will dictate what you publish and how you do it. Your audience can be broken down in the following ways.

• Creators
• Commenters
• Critics
• Spectators
• Inactives

Social Media / Networking Tips

• When publishing content to a social network only post to relevant communities
• The more you engage, the more people will engage with your content.
• Keep engagement authentic
• Create high quality content to make it link worthy
• Social media needs to integrate with your online marketing

Social Media Optimization

• Pick a username that has a connection with your business or product
• Tag and name videos & images with keywords
• Link your social profiles from your main website
• Set up your profiles and optimize them with rich keyword content

Getting Started

• Sign up for the various social accounts to claim your name space
• Start by publishing to one platform and beta test

Social Networking & Link Building
Social networking is about engaging a community. To engage a community you need to have good content that is inviting and useful. Social networking is a great way to garner releavant inbound links to your website, blog etc.. but don’t go in with the thinking that social networking is going to replace your link building stratgy.. links are a by-product of social media. Social communities will notice the transparency of your linking and oust you for it.

It’s been about 6 years since I’ve been to a Search Engine Strategies Conference. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to go this year.

There are actually several colleagues of mine that are attending also. Over the last few weeks we’ve been brushing up on what we suspect will be the hot topics… like Blogging for search, Social Networking and SEO and more.

My friend Jamie also shared this article with us on the topic… http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080708-063100