Archive for the SEO Category
7 Tips To Improve Web Page Load Time
With the increasing focus on Google’s Site Speed Algorithm, the following are 7 tips to improve web page load time, proven techniques well known websites use to boost their site speed.
1. Enable Gzip Compression
While compressing pages adds just a tad to your web server’s overhead, it will reduce bandwidth and transmission time and make pages appear to load faster for your users. Gzip is a open source compression algorithm that can be used to compress the content of your website before your the web server sends data to a client browser. You can learn how to enable Gzip in Apache here.
2. Minify Javascript/CSS
Minify is the process (and software) of removing unnecessary formatting characters and white space from javascript code. The result is smaller files, faster transmission and quicker page loads. You can learn all about minify javascript here. (more…)
Best New Chrome Extensions For Developers
With increasing popularity in Google’s Chrome browser, so increases the demand for extensions. This is especially true for Developers, as we are used to such a nice variety of high quality tools in Firefox. And the more tools are available on one browser, the more that browser is used in developing web sites, resulting in higher quality web experience for end users on that platform. Btw., did you know that Google Chrome surpasses Safari in US browser market (macstories.net)? The following are arguably the best new Chrome extensions for developers.
6. BuiltWith Technology Profiler
BuiltWith is a web site profiler tool, that returns all the technologies it can find on a particular page. BuiltWith extension helps developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies web pages are using and in turn help them to decide what technologies to implement. BuiltWith currently tracks widgets (snap preview), analytics (Google, Nielsen), frameworks (.NET, Java), publishing (WordPress, Blogger), advertising (DoubleClick, AdSense), CDNs (Amazon S3, Limelight), standards (XHTML,RSS), hosting software (Apache, IIS, CentOS, Debian).
5. Session Manager
With Session Manager you can quickly save your current browser state and reload it whenever necessary. You can manage multiple sessions, rename or remove them from the session library. Each session remembers the state of the browser at its creation time, i.e the opened tabs and windows. Once a session is opened, the browser is restored to its state.
What’s new in Google’s Search update – code named Caffeine
Google’s search algorithm update, codenamed “Google Caffeine” in set to launch in the coming days. Google Caffeine is said to stir up the Webmaster / SEO world with a slew of algorithm updates. Most predominantly, it will be much quicker than the current Google search and rely more on keyword strings in the page content, and it will make real-time search much more important.
The new focus on real-time search results means that sites that consistently ranked high will take a hit. This will give smart webmasters who understand the dynamic of real-time social media an excellent opportunity to markedly boost their Google rankings.
Here is a summary of what we know about Google Caffeine and it’s effect on SEO:
Page load speed will be important
The time it takes for a webpage to load is now important to rank high on Google. Studies have shown that improving page load speed results in improved user retention and increased conversions.
Check out Google’s Site Performance diagnostic tool in their Google Webmaster Accounts. Basically, it boils down to:
- Writing lean HTML and CSS code
- More intelligent use of Javascript
- Compressing html, css and Javascript
- Improve browser page caching
Nginx and memcached module
Memcache is traditionally used as a module inside server side scripts, such as PHP, ASP, ColdFusion and others. And it’s doing a terrific job, as long as it’s implemented correctly.
But if we look under the hood of the actual Memcache application, and I’m not talking about the PHP or ASP extension, but rather the executable that’s running as a daemon under linux, for example, it is a rather simple database like application running in memory. Now there are two basic actions that need to be performed to use it, one is writing info into memcache, the other is reading it. In a typical scenario, there are many reads for one write, that’s the whole point, isn’t it. But what if we can isolate the reading from the server side scripts, and let a small high speed module do that for us.
Auto Create Thumnails The Easy Way
Ever wondered it there is an easy way to resize your images or quickly create thumbnails from your favorite pictures?
Search no more, the awesome little utility ImageMagick does it for you.
Install it using your package manager, most of them should have it in their repository.
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
Once installed, this command will create tumbnails for all JPG’s in the current directory, 200 pixel wide/high on the longest side. Eg. if your image is in landscape layout, it’ll be 200 pixel wide, in portrait format it’ll be 200 pixel high.
for file in *.jpg ; do convert -resize 200 “$file” t”$file”; done
That’s it. Simply change 200 to the size of your liking, or change the extension if your images are in gif, png or any other image format.
Improve Web Site Traffic
There are several ways to generate and improve the attention for your web site. Some of them rather simple and easy, others thake a bit more effort and there are a few thing you really want to avoid.
1. Know what is trendy at Google, Yahoo and company
Making an effort in researching the popular keywords at popular search engines ensures that your articles are included in search results. Utilising tools such as Google Keyword Tool, Yahoo Overture Keyword Selector Tool or WordTracker can assist you in finding relevant keywords and balance them against the competition. Note that just because a keyword is very popular doesn’t necessary mean success. If there are many sites that contain those words, you competing against all of them, making it harder for your site to show up on top. And placing the keywords towards to top of your page and embed them into h1 or h2 tags improves their effect. In addition, embedding them into your page’s URL is just good seo practice.
2. Maintain a blog and get participation
The value of blogging on a consistent basis — aside from being able to share your expertise and opinions with the literate world — is that search engines will index your site more often. In addition, being an active blogger leaves your fingerprint all over the web and people will find your site by reading your posts/comments and that link back to you. For example, if you’re writing about basketball, and you participate in the important blogs in the world of NBA, having those links coming back to your site would be regarded as authority links and greatly enhance your sites page rank.
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Useful SEO tips for images
Images are often ignored when it comes to SEO, despite the fact that Google has it’s own search domain for images. Paying a little more attention to naming scheme and additional tags can make a big difference in search referred traffic.
Here are some basic tips relating to images in web pages:
- most obvious but often ignored, name the image according to it’s content. Instead of DSC00456.jpg, call it sunset-in-italy.jpg (do not use spaces in names, use dashes instead)
- make use of the “title” attribute, adding meaningful information helps search traffic
- using the “alt” attribute is debated when it comes to SEO, but should be part of any clean web design. Just imagine your image is missing or the path incorrect, the visitor at least knows that there is supposed to be an image containing what’s described in the alt tag.
- placing ample and descriptive text around the image helps search engines index the images
- store them in separate, descriptive folder
- ensure that you’re actually hosting the images, otherwise the search referred traffic will go to the image hosting site
- never use duplicate “alt” and/or “title” tags on two or more images