Search Engine Optimization Blog � SEM News & Opinion

I know I covered web page size a few times but I thought a few more things to say. Web page Load times are very important especially during this recession. Many people are switching to dial up or switching to lower speed broadband to save money. AT&T offers a 750k service for $20 a month now. Even if that were not the case I know everybody has dealt with slow web page load times on their expensive high speed connections. If you have a cable modem you are sharing an Internet connection with your whole street probably. Not to mention many people share an Internet connection in their home. If you live with somebody that plays games and/or downloads movies and music you have seen slow web page load times. Even if Google analytics is showing you 5% dial up users that does not mean you don’t have to worry about slow web page load times.

There are many things that cause slow web page load times. Many people think all they have to do to lower web page load times is get rid of images or make them smaller. There is a lot more you can do. The number of items that your page loads adds to slow web page load times. If your webpage has 30 images 2 CSS files, 4 javascript files that is 36 things that have to load. Each time a new item is loaded that ads to a longer web page load time. Consider using CSS Sprites and combing images or code that don’t need to be in several files. Also you don’t need to load all js and css for every page give specific css and js files to each section that needs them. At the very least pick your top five busiest pages and set them up so they load only what they need and nothing else. Another thing that can slow down web page load time are nested tables. I have seen webpages with 120 nested tables before. A table will not display until all of the HTML for it has loaded.

The problem is that many websites are built on top of some CMS or shopping cart. It may be impossible for some people to make these changes. The advice I give is that if your website is doing well and making you money it is worth the investment to redo the site so that it loads faster. If your just starting out or already invested a lot into a website it may not be worth the extra expense. Slow web page load times will not kill your site I’m just talking about how to make your site better. If your running a business you should always be looking for little ways to squeeze out more profit. I mentioned in a previous post on this subject that Google Maps reduced their page size by 30% and traffic went up 30%. I have also read that you have anywhere from 3 to 5 seconds to convince people to not to hit the back button. If your convince content does not load very fast you will lose sales.

Twitter offers a real time search of all users. It is a very powerful tool for marketing. It is a way to get information and a way to give information.

Online Reputation – Twitter search allows you to monitor good and bad things said about you. You should have a Twitter search rss feed set up for your company name and products as well as employee names. This gives you extra time to take advantage of that information. If it is bad information you can start tweeting a response. I would use a separate account to communicate with people that said bad things. Don’t point out bad things on your company account. If the information is a link to something bad you can start working on content to make sure the bad information does not show up first page in other search engines. It is important to know what the top ten results for your brands are and make sure it is all positive. Make sure it is hard for some negative blog post to pop out of nowhere and rank number 3 for your brand. If it is good information use your main account to re-tweet this person and follow them. It is always good to encourage your fans.

Promotion – The obvious way to promote your company and products is to make useful tweets to your followers and by sending tweets @ people. The other way is to take advantage of the real time twitter search. Make some tweets that are not toward your followers. Promote your service and use keywords that people might be searching for. If you are doing SEO and/or PPC you should have a wealth of information on what keywords are being searched for and convert. Don’t do this too often since it might alienate your followers. It is important to keep your followers. You can also use your analytics to find out what time of day is best for certain terms. Also you can work in your terms into your tweets to your followers. Twitter search works like Google in that the words do not have to be together. Lets say you want to show up for the search “buy blue widgets” all you have to do is make sure those 3 words are in your tweet anywhere and in any order and you will show up for that search.

I follow @GoogleAtWork on twitter and they twittered This link that shows how to use search operators in Gmail. I was shocked. This has changed my world. This link to see them all. I’m going to talk about a few that I’m going to start using.

“from:elliot filename:pdf” shows all messages from Elliot that have a pdf attachment

“from:eliot has:attachment” shows all messages from Elliot that have any attachment

“from:eliot in:anywhere” Shows all messages from Elliot that are in any folder trash, spam, sent…

I really like the in: feature normally I have to switch to that mailbox then do a search this way I can do all my searches from my inbox. (in:trash, in:spam)

Is:unread This shows me all my unread email

after:2004/04/16 before:2004/04/18 Messages sent between April 16, 2004 and April 18, 2004.*

If you start using labels more and/or you use Gmail to check several email address like I do the label operator is invaluable.

I wish people would not read some old blog post or forum thread about URL’s and change all their page names. Do not ever change your page names. There is no reason whatsoever to do it. Even if you switch from asp to php or some other server side language you can keep your old url’s with a very easy tweak to your system regardless of what web server you use.

There is no benefit to switching to keyword rich url’s. As a matter of fact 100% of the time there will be a negative effect in the short run.

Do you have a 404 strategy? Do you know what a 404 is? First off lets describe what a 404 is just in case you don’t know. When somebody comes to your website using a URL that does not exist by default your server will just send the user a 404 error which shows your visitor a white page with huge letters that say “NOT FOUND”. Most the time the person just hits the back button and moves on. The answer to the other question should be obvious.

I’m not going to get into the technical side of how to create a 404 page there are lots of blog posts and articles already out there. I’m going to talk about your strategy. What is your goal? Do you want to entertain, solve the problem, or act like nothing happened?

Here is a list of strategies that people use and the pros and cons of each.

1. Redirect all 404 traffic to the front page. This only slightly better than doing nothing. This confuses some people. They clicked on a specific link and they end up at your front page that may have nothing to do with what they clicked on.
2. Create a template page of your website and put a page not found message on that. With this method at least now they know that something went wrong but still does not help the person. They still can’t find what they are looking for.
3. Create a custom 404 page with some logic that tries to guess what the person is looking for. I would also put a search box on this page as well. If part of the URL is correct like the folder you can have a specific 404 landing page with a list of things they might be looking for. Try to help the visitor find what they need.
4. Create some gimmick like a funny video, cartoon, or game. This can get you some attention and might get you some viral attention. Here are some examples.

Another benefit to using a custom 404 page is that you can put your analytics code on it. If you don’t have a custom 404 page it will not show up in Google Analytics. You need to modify the tracking code on your 404 page so don’t just use the normal footer. Here is a link to how to modify that code. It is very important to monitor your 404 errors. You can find where people have linked to you incorrectly. You can send them a message to fix it or 301 redirect it to the correct page.

I saw the other day in my Adwords account that Google now offers the ability to connect your Google Base with your Google Adwords. I thought this sure is cool then I noticed that they require you to turn on Data Sharing in your Google Analytics. Every new thing they do seems to be some way for them to get your data. What are they doing with all this data?

I have put a lot of thought in what is in the future for Google. They are so big that there is serious talk of making them a monopoly. I foresee in the future that there will be a point when bandwidth will be unlimited or near unlimited. It may not be in the next 10 years but it could be in 20-30. I have read that scientists have successfully teleported data. At some point bandwidth won’t be an issue. This means that we become a completely wireless world. Cable companies, phone companies, cell phone companies will lose their monopoly.

Google is working toward managing all data that exists. When all data is on the Internet they will be entrenched as the company that knows how to find everything. In the future you will be able to set up an Adwords account and be able to advertise anywhere you want. They already have ads for TV. Not many people use it but when all TV is on the Internet Google will have worked out the bugs and have the advertiser base to handle it.

I was watching a video of Marissa Mayer from Google. There is a lot of good stuff in there but I wanted to cover this one part.

Google does a lot of A/B testing. They asked users if more results per page would be better and they said yes. Google went and did some testing to see if this was true. They found out that traffic went down by 20%. It was not because people were finding what they wanted it was because of web page load time. Remember here we are talking Google who return results in 0.16 seconds. She said returning 30 results only doubled the time so worst case it was still less than one second load time. She did not say when this test was done so it could have been when there were more people on dial up. Even if it was Google still loads very fast on dial up even 5 years ago. She then talked about Google Maps and how when it launched it was 120k in size. They reduced the size by 30% and they got 30% more maps requests. People want content fast.

Just about every site I have had to do an SEO evaluation for is over 500k and I have seen several that were 1mb. People need to understand that websites are not a TV commercial or a magazine spread. On TV and magazines you get the information instantly. You do the same thing on a website and people will be just sitting there for a bit. If a site takes longer than a few seconds to load people will hit the back button.

I have seen websites with 100k just in text from javscript, css, and html. Then there are the images. This is where things get out of hand. I had one client that had put huge .bmp files on the front page. This is an extreme and I have only seen once. The point is scale down your images and remove some altogether. Only use css that you are going to use on that page. Don’t load the css code for every page on your site for every page load.

People also need to calm down on the javascript. Very few people know how to code javascript very well so most webpages just have a script they downloaded and they have no idea what it does. Also stay away from the rapid deployment asp.net stuff. A hello world page can be 100k or more. That stuff is designed for intranet web apps. It should never be used on an active public website.

If you really care about people spending time on your website make it fast. People want information and accomplish goals they don’t want a bunch of pretty pictures and fancy navigation. Your goal is not to impress your boss or friends it is to keep people on your website. The biggest mistake that people make is they show their website already loaded to a friend or boss and ask them what they think. That is an invalid test. First off the person is only looking at it like they do a TV commercial or magazine. That is not how they will look at it if they found the site by themselves. There is a big difference. Most people are in a big hurry very few people spend a ton of time on the Internet. Granted there is always an audience that does want all the bells and whistles and is willing to wait for the load time but they are in the minority.

One of the thing I run into the most when evaluating a website for seo is the same title on every page. This can be fixed with a little bit of code. If all the pages are static you just go to each page. If the page is using a header file then you have to make some changes. If they have a lot of static pages with an include file for the header you are still going to have to go and change every page. If you have a lot of data in a database you can just make some changes in the header file. Here is the php code to fix the problem.

Website using header file on a bunch of static pages.

Include File:
<title>
<?php
if($title){echo $title; }else{ echo "Generic Title";}
?>
</title>
 
Static Page
<?php
$title = "Unique Title";
include 'header.inc';
?>

Your still going to have to go to every page and put that on it. This allows you to keep a header file that you can change in one place. If your site is completely dynamic your going to need to add a title field to your database and populate it with Titles. Then use the same if statement on the title tag but echo the title from the db.

Google has announced that you can tell them what URL is correct. This is very helpful for enforcing URL’s. The new feature is called

Google says they treat it as a “hint that we honor strongly” I still believe that you should enforce url’s yourself programaticly using 301 redirects. One of the reasons for having nice short URL’s that contain Keywords in them is to make it easier for people to link to you. It is also to make it easier to email your link and post links in chats or forums. You don’t want people using www.tinyurl.com for your links because you are now advertising tiny url and not your site.

I typed HYIP into google and saw a bunch of adwords advertisers and the first result was a deffinition by Wikipedia (of course)

“”A high-yield investment program (HYIP) is a type of Ponzi scheme, which is an investment scam that promises an unsustainably high return” The ads were obvious scams and the first organic result was a big warning. The people bidding on “hyip” are fishing for really stupid people. It just amazes me that people are that stupid.

Shouldn’t google adwords watch out for scams?

The Internet marketing industry is buzzing about the possibility of Google switching to AJAX based pages. This would break many programs that scrape Google. Many people scrape Google for many reasons some harmless and some very malicious. Every time a visitor queries Google it costs them a very small am amount of money. This does not seem like a big deal until you consider how many people are doing it and how often.

This will probably only stop armatures. Scraping Google is so profitable that the pros will figure out a way and fast and some may already use tactics that are not affected by it. I’m sure that scraping Google has gotten so out of hand that this switch would save Google a lot of money.