Techcrunch reported yesterday that Google are now offering a service which will optimise your websites code automatically and in turn reduce the load times of your website for viewers. The service works signing up and pointing your sites DNS entry to Google, which then enables Google to store, recode and serve your website from servers around the world – meaning that users will have your website served to them from a localised Google server instead of your hosting server.
Google has been obsessed with trying to get webmasters to speed up their website for the last year or so, saying that faster websites generates a higher click through rate and reduces bounce rates for users visiting your website. With their new service Google reports that it will improve the speed of your website by 25 to 60 percent, with this in mind I thought I would use the test which Google suggests to benchmark my website and see how much of an improvement I would get.
The Results
As you can see from the test results, the optimised version of my website is actually 0.9 seconds slower than it is now, but I have worked hard on my website to get it to load as fast as possible so I was expecting the figures to be similar.
Server Location
The test above was done using a server based within the UK, and since my hosting is UK based I wanted to run a second test from a US based test server which gave me a 0.9 second improvement which suggests that Geo targeting servers will reduce load times for visitors abroad:
Personally I think this could be a great service for businesses which target multiple countries if you don’t have the resources to recode your website, but this will not be a service I will use myself as having already optimised my website for speed I get little or no improvement from this.
If you want more information about this service, or if you would like to run the test for yourself then you can find everything you need here. It is important to mention that the test which Google suggests that you run may give a completely accurate result.
I have been around SEO for quite a few years now and like everyone else within the industry I learned the trade by running tests, reading blog posts / articles and speaking to others, to be honest this is the only way to learn SEO as it’s something that can’t be taught at a college or university. This seems to be the main problem, there are no rules or regulations surrounding our industry like most – we just choose to follow Google’s guidelines or risk losing our hard work.
Because there are no real rules and regulations many SEO companies have been set up by people with little or no experience expecting easy money, for example I had a phone conversation with someone in December asking me how easy SEO and link building was and how easy would is to get started within the industry – these guys really annoy me! how does he expect to run an SEO angency with no experience of SEO?
Are SEO’s To Blame?
Some SEO’s I feel are to blame for creating the minefield we find ourselves in, just take a look around some of the top rated SEO blogs / communities and you will see a great number of articles giving misleading information or information that could be misinterpreted – this gives newcomers to the industry the wrong message which then gets passed onto clients and can lead to them losing a great deal of money.
On top of this problem there quite a few spam sites setup offering SEO qualifications like “Search Engine Ambassador” stuff like this could edge a business to go for the “qualified” company instead of a genuine SEO company who could actually give them ROI.
What About the Newspapaers?
There have been 2 major news stories surrounding SEO, take the JCPenny story for example, this story in my eyes gives people the wrong impression of what we actually do for our clients and it could lead to many businesses running away from their SEO contracts.
At the end of the day what’s done is done and I feel it’s going to be a vicious circle of SEO newbie reads blog post full of misleading information, starts working for a client, client gets banned or sees no results, client rants in public spaces and the SEO industry takes another blow.
Over the last week I have been making some changes to by blog, these changes were made for three reasons – to decrease indexation times, increase crawler activity and hopefully increase rankings and traffic over time. Sadly I cannot publish any results because as usual I have managed to get a -30 Page penalty on a few keywords during a test which was not related to my new changes (The Keyword spam which I tweeted about a few days ago – so instead of posting results I would like to go through the changes that I’ve made then do a follow-up post on the results.
Does exactly what you think it does, auto generates a new XML sitemap and pings search engines with the updated version.
Majestic SEO Dashboard Widget
This is a great plug-in from Dan Taylor that displays Majestic’s link growth graphs within your WordPress Dashboard, giving you a good idea of how your blog is growing over time without having to leave your website – this is something which will be important for me during testing the new setup
nStatistics
If you want a plug-in which will display crawler activity on your blog then look no further, install this plug-in and get pretty graphs displaying both user and crawler activity over time
RSS Footer
I have been doing a bit of work with RSS directories recently and wanted a way to put static links at the bottom of every post in my RSS feed – job done
Feed2tweet
Just your every day auto Tweeter for your new posts.
Tweet old post
Ok so everyone has been wondering what plug-in Michael Grey has been using to display his archived posts, it’s just most people couldn’t be bothered to search for this obvious plug-in (says allot for the SEO community).
WP OnlyWire Auto Poster
Most SEO’s have an OnlyWire account for getting those bookmarks quickly – now you can auto post to OnlyWire via this plug-in every time you publish a blog post.
I’ve Done The Plug-ins Now The Fun Bit
As some people know I have been setting up quite a few profiles recently, most of which have ways to aggregate either your Twitter feed or your blog RSS feed, some of which will even accept your social bookmarking accounts (Example Here) and then give you an additional RSS feed output – which ten leads to some fun with RSS directories and so on.
With this in mind and the fact I’m auto posting links to OnlyWire (which sends out to quite a few places) you can imagine the 1000’s of links that could instantly be built to your new blog post as soon as you hit that publish button .
Now The Boring Bit
Now because I have just suggested a way to fully automate link building for a WordPress blog I thought I should put in a little disclaimer – In no way am I saying go out and do this, as most people know I test things with this blog and sometimes I will blog about these tests, I have not fully tested the above and would never use this technique for any clients. There are people who do this kind of thing already, out of which some make mistakes and get penalties, so be warned!
Google has recently announced that they will be adding a Facebook style voting system called +1 that will affect the rankings of search results while signed into your Google account. The system will work by people voting on their favourite pages online, these will then be viewable within your contacts search results – see example below.
In a perfect world a search engine that does this would be great – result sets that you can trust because it’s made up of websites / services that your friends trust and use.
The contact list for +1 will be made up from everyone on you’re:
Gmail / Google Talk Contact List
The ‘My Contacts’ group in Google Contacts
People your following on Google Buzz and Google Reader
Looking at the list above its clear to say that there will be quite a few people that will be in these lists that you don’t want personalising results, especially if you’re an SEO – could make it easy to spot who is working with what client(s), here is what Google says:
“You can’t control who sees your +1’s because +1’ing is a public action. Anyone on the Web could potentially see the things you’ve +1’d”
Can The System Be Gamed?
At the moment there is only talk of this being implemented to users that are signed into Google and should not affect regular searches, but if we think back to the Google Toolbar ‘block result’ where they actually implemented it using the top blocked results its clear to say that the most +1’ed results may also be given more authority over time.
I was going to include Google’s view on how it will affect search results but it seems that the exact page I’m looking for has been removed (Matt Cutts tweeted the page yesterday) – basically it was talking about how potentially +1’s could be factored into the current ranking factors (without any mention of being signed in).
Personally I feel this could be another avenue that Google will go down and quickly backtrack on – here is what what Yousef from ElevateLocal thinks about the +1 feature:
“Google must find an innovative and seamless way to have people influence rankings, unfortunately +1 is neither innovative nor seamless. If it ever takes off and given the public nature of +1, it will be abused by spammers. Very soon we will notice a sudden surge of +1 tasks on Mechanical Turks. As far as PPC is concerned, I think +1 has the capacity to improve CTR significantly. “
If anyone else has thoughts on this please drop a comment
A question I get asked a lot is how much body copy do I need for SEO? In the early days I used to say from 250 to 500 words. Now I prefer a more custom approach that I learned from Bruce Clay.
It starts with understanding that different queries will call for different amounts of copy. A searcher performing an informational query “how to use an slr camera” wants more copy than someone performing a transactional query “cheap sony slr camera 398.”
Consequently, Google will try to match the results to searcher intent. So if you want your page to rank for a transactional query, make your page look like a product details page, and pare back the copy. If you want to rank for an informational query, bulk up the copy.
So how do you figure out how much copy you need? Figure out which pages are ranking for the keyword you’re targeting, then look at how much body copy they’re sporting. Clearly Google has decided this is roughly the amount of body copy a page targeting this query needs, so write your page to fit within those parameters.
This just a guide. If all the other pages have 1000 words but you only have 250-words worth of stuff to say about the topic, either re-evaluate the topic or leave it at 250. Don’t sacrifice user experience in the name of SEO.
At the same time, don’t let designers or other marketers tell you “no one wants to read that much copy.” Tell that to Wikipedia. People go online for information, generally in the form of words or pictures. Give people the information they want, no more, no less.
So, the amount of body copy on a page will depend on searcher intent, who’s ranking for the query you’re targeting, and how much you really have to say about the topic.
Cathy Reisenwitz is a Birmingham, Alabama-based SEO. She blogs at Birmingham SEO Blog.
Quite a bit has changed since I my Link Building 101 was published on SEOmoz – most of which still applies to this year but I thought I would take the time to list what I feel will be the important / unimportant link types for 2011.
Social Media Links
Google has admitted that it values links from social media profiles such as Twitter and Facebook even though they are no-follow (unless you put one on your personal Facebook page) but what about other links coming from what we would call social media profiles?
Personally I feel that any link coming from pages containing social media components will be valued higher by Google and possibly other search engines – why wouldn’t they?
Verdict: Important
Site-Wide Links
Since around November / December site-wide links seem to have taken a massive hit, this may be because it is one of the easiest link types for Google to crack down on when looking into link spam – Lists of links containing “money” keywords rolled up one after the other must be easy to spot.
Verdict: Stay Away (or use branded keywords)
Guest Blog Posts
Guest posting is a great way to get links and always has been – provide a great post and that post will get links from Twitter profiles and other blogs to help power your link.
Verdict: Important
Contextual Ad’s
Contextual Ad’s seemed to pop up quite a bit last year (some disguised as Banner Ad’s) and seem to work well for now but I think these types of adverts will be the next link type to be discounted by Google (if they can).
Verdict: Potentially Dangerous
Blog / Forum Commenting
This link type is usually associated with spam, if you do this properly and post a great comment it is more likely to stick and prompt replies from the community. These links are in no way powerful and will not help you rank on their own but they provide you with a good mix of natural anchors and nofollow links which can help build a solid base for other link types and create background noise around your website.
Verdict: Important
Directories
Directories have always been the bread and butter of link building – I’ve seen many posts over the last few months saying there is no point in these BUT people seem to forget about the hundreds of high quality directories out there – when submitting just keep an eye out for spam.
Verdict: Important
At the end of the day these are just my opinions on how important these link types will be to the search engines this year so it would be great if you could leave your thoughts too.
