Make Money from Blogs » Google

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 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

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 29 – Dynamic URL vs. Static URL – Part 1

ashish — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:59:24 +0000

There has always been a case made about using static URL’s in your site, rather than using the dynamic URL’s that are generated by many web applications. In 2008, Google came out with a statement that they have greatly improved their indexing of dynamic URL’s, and that the chance that people might not get the URL rewriting correct when they seek to convert dynamic URL’s to static URL’s is fairly high. As a result, people might start thinking that it is better to let dynamic URL’s remain as they are. Here is a link to the Google page which discusses Dynamic vs. Static URL’s (link)

While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static.

Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic). You may be able to remove some parameters which aren’t essential for Googlebot and offer your users a nice looking dynamic URL. If you are not able to figure out which parameters to remove, we’d advise you to serve us all the parameters in your dynamic URL and our system will figure out which ones do not matter. Hiding your parameters keeps us from analyzing your URLs properly and we won’t be able to recognize the parameters as such, which could cause a loss of valuable information.

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static.

Does this matter to people who do Search Engine Optimization. Surprising, it does not matter. Even though there is this clear message from Google, they still advocate the use of static URL’s rather than using dynamic URL’s, and I will cover those reasons in detail in the next post.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 19 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:42:13 +0000

For the last couple of posts, I have been concentrating on strategies and processes on how to get more incoming links (build links for SEO), and it is worth a few posts to consider the possible strategies and techniques required to focus on getting more incoming links. Links are one of the most significant ways to get a higher search engine ranking. Here are some more techniques to move ahead on this:
- As part of link building strategies, there is not much focus on having internal link build strategies, you know, where you link to pages within your own site. However, research indicates that having a effective link strategy to your own pages helps in link love, and ensures that pages improve slightly in terms of ranking; this would mean that you would need to ensure that you can reach most pages in your site within a couple of links rather than having complicated linking strategies. This also means that if you have a cool JavaScript based internal page structure, you are worse off. In simple terms, the navigation system of a site should be easy and simple.
- Even if you do get links from external sites, it is becomes useful when such sites are recognized as valid sites in terms of linking; so such sites must seem like natural sites which are somewhat similar to what you are doing rather than unrelated sites that are obviously more of linking sites. Focusing on sites which are more of the former rather than obvious linking farm types of sites is much more useful
- There is nothing wrong in linking to sites that seem relevant to you and the subject that you are talking about. If you do link to external sites that are relevant, then it gives an indication of the validity of your site to search engines. In addition, when you link out unsolicited, and other webmasters see you linking to them, there is a high chance that they will link back to you. Hoarding your links does not earn you any benefits, neither does only trading links.
- Check out your the number of links that your competitor has, and then search for the higher value ranked site that links to your competitor (or if you don’t refer to other sites as competitors, consider other sites that offer content similar to yours) and start focusing on those sites to get links from.
- Keep in mind that link building process is a slow and gradual effort, and can take to achieve results. There is a temptation to try and take short cuts to get there faster, which means also using techniques that can cause problems, or to depend on consultants that can get you in problem with the major search engines.

Here is a Youtube video on Link building:

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 18 – How to get links (contd ..)

ashish — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:15:52 +0000

In the previous post (How to get links for SEO), I outlined some more steps to get good quality incoming links. Some of these may be something that you think that you can do, in other cases, you might be somewhat worried or embarrassed. For example, I know some people who are very embarrassed about the thought of writing lots of emails to other webmasters requesting for a link; for such people, it is important to keep in mind that getting links is one form of promotion and is also a marketing strategy. For any sort of marketing, even the most effective ones, people need to learn how to promote their own blogs and be not in the least bit afraid of doing useful steps if that means that promotion of their blogs happen.
- Look to find some experts in the field that you are writing about, and if you can get interviews or an explanation of their techniques, you will find more people linking back to your site. This may require some amount of persistence in getting these interviews or comments, but the result will be worth it.
- Court controversy. This is a controversial tip, and is more relevant if you are writing about some sort of news, reviews, or something where opinions can be strong. If you take strong views on a particular subject, especially if you are going against the majority opinion, then you will find a lot of people linking to you, even if these referred posts are critical of your viewpoint.
- Get in depth about the topics you write about. This is back to the viewpoint about writing posts that has a rich content, but this can be repeated again and again; if you do a lot of research about the topics you are writing about and come up with content that ir rich, you will find a number of people linking to you even without your needing to do anything about it. In fact, if you have a series of well written posts, then many people will start referring to you as a guru.
- Being quick on the take. This sort of tip is more useful for people who write about news related stuff. How many times have you seen blogs being referred to when a blog makes a scoop of some information that has not yet made it to the popular news – no need to answer, this happens many time. Conversely, If you write about a subject that has already been beaten to death, then you will not find many people even interested in this post, forget linking to your post.
- Encourage people to link to your post. In many cases, a large percentage of the people who think about linking to your posts don’t follow through for any reason (could be laziness, could be putting off the linking, and so on). What you need to do is to encourage people to link to your posts by proving a section at the end of the post (something like, if you like this post, why not link to this post -and create a small box where you provide the code to do this linking)
- Use Twitter and give an option to readers to re-tweet your posts. Once this happens, when people happen upon your posts, many of them will actually try to re-tweet your posts (when I say many of them, even 5% doing so is a good percentage); this in turn makes your post accessible to more people and increases the percentage of people who will link to your post.