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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 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 24 – Making sure that you have fresh content on a regular basis

ashish — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:12:57 +0000

The previous post talked (Understanding the robots.txt file) about learning what the Robots.txt file is, and how you can use it to tweak the way that search engines index your site.
This post will move onto one important area that I have talked about briefly in other posts before (having regular content), but it is important enough that we talk about it again. So, here goes. What do we mean by regular content for your site ? We mean content that is fresh, is something that does not like it has been copied from a million other sites, and seems interesting to your users. When search engines find new content on your site on a regular basis, this results in an increased ranking of your site. However, this new content needs to be fresh, and not copied from other sites, since the search engines will not rank sites higher if the content is copied (and can actually penalize sites). For example, I had a site which was a content aggregator for my other sites, and apparently Google believed that the duplicate content on the site was actually an attempt to deceive the search engines, and had marked this aggregator site with a penalty. Even though I started adding new content to this site after this warning, Google still has not ranked this site with any kind of PageRank, and I believe that the site has some time to go before I can start getting some PageRank. This is an extreme case of the duplicate content penalty, but any site that seems to have willfully copied the content from other sites face such problems.
In addition, your readers would expect regular content on your site. People who subscribe to a site can be very fickle, so if you are irregular in terms of adding content, then expect many readers to move away from your site, and even people who subscribe to your site will not be sticky. I have found that as long as you have a regular pattern of new content, and your readers know this pattern, you will have readers who tend to be more sticky (and this is increased when you have content that is interesting to your users). I have also found that getting new content updated on a daily basis ensures that your content is updated very frequently, and search engine crawlers come visiting to your site frequently (which is important, since you do not want your content to show up on search engines with a lag).
If you are not able to generate the required amount of fresh content, then look for more ways to get such content. This can be through hiring people to generate this content, or trying to get people impressed by your content to write their own articles. Look for such options to generate more content for your site.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 5

ashish — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:26:52 +0000

The previous post in the series (Duplicate content and Search Engines) talked about duplicate content, how search engines ignored such content, and could potentially penalize you for the same.
This post talks more about how to structure your content for improving your rankings in Search Engines and involves the use of keywords in H1 and other headings. In a previous post, we talked about Keyword density should form around 4-6% of your post contents (not more, otherwise it will look like keyword stuffing). Identify key phrases that you want to emphasize in your post before making the post, and get a general idea of the location where you should use these keyword phrases. So, for example, if you consider this post, you should use the following keyword phrases ‘Search Engine Optimization’, ‘SEO’, ‘Content’, ‘Search Engine Ranking’, and similar such phrases.
- The title and H1 tags in your post should contain some of these phrases, but always keep in mind that the they should still be readable and be comprehensible to your readers. So, if you have a title such as ‘Search Engine Optimization Search Engine Ranking SEO’, it has a number of keywords, but does not form any sort of correct grammar (and keep in mind, that for titles and headings, you can use phrases instead of sentences), then it can look strange to readers. It is not very hard to have a correct combination of a keyword dense title that makes sense.
- With the above example, as you get down to the H2 and H3 tags, include the main sections of these keywords such as using ‘Search Engine’, or ‘Search Ranking’, so you are not stuffing your keyword phrases in all your headings, but are still using some of these keywords in a way that makes sense to your readers
- In the body of your message, use sections of your keyword phrases such as ‘Search Engine’, ‘Ranking’, etc, utilizing them in the body of the message, but keep in mind that your usage of the phrases should fit in with the body of the message and not break the flow of the post body.
- The way to start in this technique is to first write your post in your regular flow, and then optimize it for Search Engine Optimization. As a part of this, make sure that you use around 60 characters for the title of your post. Now, review your post and then consider breaking up the sections of the post using H2 tags; this helps to guide your readers through the post, and also provides relevant tags for the search engines.
- A typical WordPress installation has multiple links to the same content, and it makes sense to reduce some of the potential duplicate nature of these content that is visible to search engines when they spider your site. Using a plugin such as the All-In-One-SEO can set noindex for some of these locations, reducing the areas where this duplicate content is visible
[Consider this video about how to use the All-In-One-SEO-Pack (link)]

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 4

ashish — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:48:28 +0000

In the previous post (Content is king for blogging), I had talked about various tips for using content to increase your search engine rankings. In this post, I will talk more about how having duplicate content on your blog (copying content from another blog) can lead to penalties for your blog, and what are the steps you should do to ensure that you don’t suffer from penalties.
- First of all, if you are writing content that is not duplicate, many of your readers who would have wanted to get some quality information (and who would have already read similar information on other sites will quickly skip over and may not come back if they see this happening on a regular basis)
- Search engines also want to ensure that their users do not get the same type of content in their search results, and hence will penalize sites which have content that are duplicate of each other. Search engines have complicated algorithms that are able to distinguish as to which blog was the original content creator, and which blogs have copied the content.
Read more about it at this blog (duplicate content penalty)

If your content was copied from another source, the search engines will not list those pages or give you any credit for that content since it was indexed already from another site. Does this mean it is alright to do and I will not get a penalty? No it is not, consider it a self imposed penalty on your own real estate website as those pages will never be indexed, thus a waste of your time and a waste of page space on your website.

- There are many cases where you want to syndicate your content to other sites. For example, you would certainly want to write an article on other sites that are highly ranked to get some incoming link credit (will explain this technique later), but how do you avoid a duplicate content penalty by having this same article on your site as well. There are 2 ways of doing this – You can either send a shorter version of your content for syndication, or you can create 2 different versions for syndication and for your own blog. This will help you to avoid the duplicate content penalty
- If you do have duplicate content on your site, then it is very much possible that aggrieved content owners who had the original content on their sites come after you. They can issue you cease and desist letters, or can actually file cases against you with your service providers or hosting companies. So, in addition to search engines ignoring this content, you can actually get into hassles with this content.
- However, you are not prohibited from quoting other blogs if you appreciate the blog or want to post a critique of the blog. You would need to post a link to the blog post which you are referring, and can post a small section of the post length while either praising or criticizing the post. You should make sure that you are not copying the central idea of the post, or posting huge chunks of the post.

As usual, you will hear more in the next post about content, SEO and related stuff.

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