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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 35 – The impact of page speed upon search engine optimization

ashish — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:42:43 +0000

In the previous post (SEO and inline code / CSS), I talked about the impact of having a large amount of extra stuff in your files, such as scripting code and CSS, and how this can potentially impact your SEO optimization levels and your ranking. In this post, the focus is going to be on site speed and its implication for search engine ranking (specifically for Google, but one would assume for other search engines later as well).
Having pages that are loading quickly is an important factor in ensuring that your readers do not get turned off from your site. So, if you have a lot of JavaScript or calculated logic inside your pages (or use Flash or other rich media extensively, even for simple tasks such as navigation controls), there are a number of readers who will find your pages through search engine results and then get turned off since the page takes too long to load (you would do well to consider your own behavior when you find a site that loads very slowly, or that has large images which take a long time to load, and then extrapolate the same behavior to your readers as well).
Here are some specific tools from Google that will help in evaluating your speed levels (link). Be sure to evaluate your page for both size and speed, and take a number of steps to reduce the time taken for such pages to be served to your readers (contrary to common misconception, your server / host capabilities is not the only factor, there are a number of other steps that can be taken to reduce the page loading times).
Google recently came out with a post (Google Blog) that talks about how Google is starting to use site speed as a factor in terms of ranking sites (and even though they significantly understate the implications of this change, one should be sure that it is going to be a factor that is more important when you challenge the more prominent search engine rankings).

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
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.

So, the point is clear. In addition to other factors, consider how fast your page loads as part of your checklist for Search Engine Optimization (and consider changing your SEO expert if they have not been asking you about page speeds – it is quite clear that they are not keeping up with SEO news). Use a number of tools for the same. Follow a number of steps:
1. Complex scripting is avoided or moved to a different location from it is downloaded (and maybe cached)
2. Keep the size of all components on a page such as images, videos, etc optimized
3. Move heavier objects off your site and onto other faster loading domains (such as images onto external sites that provide image hosting, videos converted to Flash and served from Youtube, etc)

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 34 – What happens when you have too much inline script code and CSS ..

ashish — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 09:29:39 +0000

The previous post talked about the use of frames (Frames and SEO) in your site, and how this impacts your SEO efforts and your ranking. In this post, we will talk about another common practice indulged in by a number of page owners, and which can impact their rankings. This is related to having scripting and CSS code inside their web pages, mixed with content. For some time now, a number of sites have been advocating that such scripting and CSS should be moved to linked files rather than inside the common page. In this post, I will explain the reasons for the same, and implications on Search Engine Optimization.
It may seem very convenient to put scripting code and CSS within pages (or use PHP server side functions to insert the code inside the page when the server is rendering the page). However, it causes problems to search engines. When you have all these content in the page content files, it causes the page to bloat up and the search engine crawler has to do more searching to find the actual content in the files (and you do want you actual content to be easily found by the search engines, not the ‘beautifully’ created code and CSS files that look like junk to the search engines). Given the amount of content that search engine crawlers have to go through (after all, they have to content the entire universe of content on the web), if a page seems very long and complicated and slow to search engine crawlers, they can very ignore such content and move on. You need to make it easier for them to find the relevant content in your pages. Further, the closer that content is to the start of your HTML page, the better (and when you have code and CSS that is present, it is typically above the content and hence likely to make it more difficult for your content to be found by the search engines).
What can you do ? Well, you can move all your script and CSS code to a separate file that is called from within your page. Of course, it does not mean that you need to take all your code and just move it to a file, there will need to be references to this file in the page; this will need to be done carefully and tested to make sure that it works and there was no slipup in the process of doing this. However, once it is done, then there are no further issues and the reader will be unable to make out any difference (unless the more technically interested reader looks the source of your file). And of course, such external files are also cached by some browsers, so if your readers frequently come to your site, the same files will not be loaded again and again and will enable faster loading.
One final advantage, and this is of benefit to you. If you keep your scripting code and CSS in a separate file that is being called by other pages, then any maintenance needed on your code or CSS is much easier and less messy.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 33 – Using frames in your page is frowned upon as a part of SEO

ashish — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 06:34:02 +0000

In the previous post (rich content and SEO), we argued that rich content by itself, even though it may look attractive to a section of your users, can pose problems for SEO since search engine crawlers don’t know how to easily read and index rich content. In this post, we talk about the use of frames and its potential for improving or causing problems to your Search Engine ranking,
A lot of you may even wonder about what frames are, and why are we even talking about frames ? After all, when sites first came up, there was a huge push to use frames as a way to separate out different sections of your site, and keep some sections fixed while the user could wander around in the other sections of your site. And it was something new, something cool (keep in mind that I am talking about several years back). However, what is the scene today ? There are sites that have been created from earlier that are using this method, and their owners worry about why their sites still do not have a prominent place in search engine results.
Frames is considered by many to be a dead technology, since you can use CSS if you want to ensure stuff such as a corporate logo always being visible, or any other matter that you would always like the user to see even if everything else in the other frame is scrolling.
Why are frames considered bad ? The construction of frames is such that you have a structure that splits the page into a container which hosts the different frames, which seemingly act as separate pages. And search engines treat them like separate pages (with some search engines actually having difficulty in going beyond the container code and not being able to get to the individual pages contained in the frames – this has to do with the assembler frame actually referencing the included frames as a ‘src’ tag rather than a ‘href’ tag). Even those search engines that are able to index the pages within the frames do so without any reference to the framed structure of the page, and when somebody visits the page from a search engine result, they will actually lead directly to the page. When they reach such a page, they no longer have the frame within their browser, and may find navigation to other elements of the site as a big problem.
What is a solution to this ? Well, using the NOFRAMES tag is a solution, but it requires for you to place your content in a separate section marked by the Noframes tag and search engines will read this. However, this also means that you need to spend more effort to ensure that all your content is kept in a sort of duplicate mode, and I am sure that you could use other means of replicating the usefullness of frames and do more for Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 32 – How do users see rich content such as Flash, Movies, etc.

ashish — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:10:18 +0000

This is a subject that has come up before in a smaller way, but needs more details and more explanation. In the last few years, the use of content has expanded to include rich multimedia content. Using Youtube Videos, using other videos, using Flash animations and even using Flash for menus and for hosting images (such as one major company has done for their photo hosting site) has had a dramatic increase. It is recognized that the usage of such rich media helps keep users interested, and when you consider the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”, this increases when you have a Video that keeps your users interested, and allows you to increase the time that people spend on your site (Imagine a site where a review of gadgets is done, the effect is increased manifold when the visitors can see the same review of the gadget in the form of an additional video where they can actually see things working – in such cases, if they are impressed by the review, a properly placed affiliate link to buy the product can actually catch a fair number of people and earn additional money). So, this should make you want to change your strategy to add more rich content to your site, after all, it will bring additional visitors to your site who will stay longer.
The problem with the above statement is that part of it is not true if your site depends on search engines for its visitors, and has not yet built up a strong position on the first page of results. The reason for that is very simple – Search engines are still not able to index the contents of these rich media effectively. So, even though Google has been trying for some time to understand the content of Flash, and even try to figure out stuff from inside videos, it is a long way away from being able to properly index your rich content (what this means in simple English is – if you have a great video review of a new camera, a search engine cannot figure out that this is a video of a review and cannot make out what the details of the review are all about). So, if you are a big site that routinely figures in the top search results, then you can go in for the rich media content to a much larger degree, but if you are a smaller site, then if you decide to go in for increased rich media, make sure that you are not betting your entire strategy on these rich media. Visit the site using a browser that is configured like a search engine crawler, and you will realize that search engines will almost totally ignore such rich media. If you do want to have these rich media, then there should be enough text based content to satisfy the search engines, as well as enough title text on these rich media so that the search engines can understand what these rich media are all about.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 30 – Dynamic URL vs. Static URL – Part 2

ashish — Wed, 05 May 2010 18:11:20 +0000

In the previous article (Google and Static vs. Dynamic URL’s), we talked about how Google had put out a post that claimed that users should not try to go in for URL rewriting to convert their dynamic into static URL’s, given the many issues that could happen if this rewriting does not work properly; further, the Google Search engine is starting to index these dynamic URL’s. However, in the rest of this article, we will talk about how getting static URL’s is indeed a target to achieve, and there are many benefits of doing so.
- The part about Dynamic URL’s being easily indexed is partially correct, and that too only for Google, with not too many claims from the other search engines about being so easily able to index dynamic URL’s
- These dynamic URL’s can be pretty long, with strange characters, and are not easily human readable.
- The static URL’s are easily readable, and make sense for users, since if you are following previous advice, the best effort is to ensure that your URL already contains keywords, and hence users can easily make out what the subject of the post will be from the URL
- Given that the dynamic URL’s are longer, there is a higher chance of these URL’s getting clipped when they are shared (through email, chat, etc). A clipped URL will not work, reducing the chance that readers will come to these pages
- A dynamic URL with a mixture of characters, question marks, etc cannot be easily used in marketing campaigns, when compared to a static URL that is short and easy to market
- When a dynamic URL is used in links from other sites (in cases when the other site uses the URL itself as the anchor text), the keyword contained as a part of the URL will increase search engine value
- It has been demonstrated in the past that static URL’s have a higher click through rate, since when a user sees the URL, they are able to identify the contents to some degree, and if they are interested, they will click through
- It is fairly easy to construct static URL’s without doing any kind of rewriting, on common blogging platforms such as Blogger, and WordPress
- If you are using other platforms where there is no automatic way of generating static URL’s, then you need to be much careful about using solutions for URL rewriting