Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

Google leads when it comes to quality of search engine results for end-users. If you are looking for something, usually Google will find it. That’s why Google wants to continue to satisfy it’s customers.

Google has now added a new factor to the rankings of their search engine results. Research has shown that faster loading web sites adds to a user experience. They stay on fast longer web sites for a longer period of time.

Web sites that are slow to load are often aborted because they take too long to load.

What about your web site?
How long does your web site take to load? If your web site is slow to load, are you losing visitors? Now, you will not only lose visitors but your search engine rankings will drop.

Slow loading web site factors
The factors are all measured from the users’ point of view. How long it takes for a web site to be downloaded and rendered on a users computer screen is the measurement used.

There are two great books based on this topic by Steve Souders – High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites.

Here are his rules for producing fast web sites -

• Rule 1 – Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Rule 2 – Use a Content Delivery Network
• Rule 3 – Add an Expires Header
• Rule 4 – Gzip Components
• Rule 5 – Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Rule 6 – Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Rule 7 – Avoid CSS Expressions
• Rule 8 – Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Rule 9 – Reduce DNS Lookups
• Rule 10 – Minify JavaScript
• Rule 11 – Avoid Redirects
• Rule 12 – Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Rule 13 – Configure ETags
• Rule 14 – Make AJAX Cacheable

Wrap Up
If you optimise your website, your users will have a better experience and you will get higher rankings in Google search results.

What is the GoogleBot?
The googlebot is the automatic spider program that Google uses to visit websites and report back with results to put into it’s search engine results. By understanding how the GoogleBot works and how it interprets your web pages, can increase your search engine rankings.

There are many factors that Google considers when indexing web pages. Here are a couple of questions and answers about how the GoogleBot works and how to get better search engine rankings.

What is host load limit?
Host load limit is the number of connections that your webserver allows at any given time.

A webserver with a lot of busy websites, would be limited to the number of connections each website can have.

That is why it’s important to have a reliable host that does not have overloaded servers. This means that the GoogleBot can index your website quickly and entirely without being restricted.

What is crawl budget?
Google will index a number of web pages on your website which is directly proportional to your PageRank. The lower the PageRank, the less pages of your website will be crawled. If you have a higher PageRank, most, if not all of your pages will be crawled.

The better your PageRank, the deeper the GoogleBot will go with indexing your website.

How does duplicate content affect crawl budget?
If the GoogleBot crawls three of your web pages and they all have the same content, Google will only index one of those pages and scrap the other two pages. It will then assign a lower PageRank value because of the duplicate content resulting in less pages being indexed by Google.

Are Session IDs bad for my website?
Google does not recommend the use of session ids for a number of reasons. They look ugly which is hard for the user to remember the address and less users are likely to click on a complicated link.

Google and Yahoo both have tools to remove unwanted variables in the address bar. Any variables that do not add value to the user’s experience can be removed for indexing.

Does 301 redirects take the link juice?
If you move a page or even change domain names, it is highly recommended to use 301 redirects. The link juice is carried to the new page. If the original page has a PageRank of 3, the new redirected page would take it.

There is some decay in the PageRank value but much of it is carried on.

What is a canonical tag?
Google has a fantastic post that describes everything about canonical tags including the new cross referencing of domain names. Specify your canonical.

I’m going to describe an important concept about content that appears year after year on your website. If you had a product that came out each year, for example – a car model from Toyota called the Corolla, what address would give it?

• http://toyota.com.au/corolla
• http://toyota.com.au/corolla-series-8
• http://toyota.com.au/corolla2009

Still unsure? read on and I will explain which one to use.

What is Cyclical Content?
Cyclical content can be defined as information about a product, service or event that comes out each year or period.

You may have an awards event that is on every year or a new model of a product every six months.

The mistake most web designers make when working on your website
Many web designers will make the website address for your event, product or service with the date attached to it or the series number or something like that. For example, the awards website address that you have this year is http://yourname.com.au/awards09

What happens next year and people are searching for your awards website address in Google? They type in the name of your awards but what address comes up? This year and all your previous awards website address will be competing against each other.

The answer
The best website address to use is the same one every year or every time the product is released.

These are good addresses because it says the same -

• http://toyota.com.au/corolla
• http://yourname.com.au/awards

It doesn’t matter what year it is, the current information for your awards will be found in the same spot. Previous years’ award information won’t be competing against other years.

If you wanted to look at the 2006 model of the Toyota Corolla, you would use this address – http://toyota.com.au/corolla/2006. If you wanted this year’s model, you would use – http://toyota.com.au/corolla.

Wrap Up
I hope you understand how to use your website address in the most practical way to keep ranking your website high in the search engine results.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be defined as optimising your website so search engines can rank your website in the natural search results, as high as possible for those targetted keywords.

But is all the effort in SEO really worth it?
Should you put all that time and effort into optimising your website so that when the search engine bots come through, that your page will rank higher?

Should you even think about paying an SEO professional to do it for you? What return on investment can you expect?

There’s no  guarantees
No one can guarantee number one position for your chosen keywords for the natural search results. You might get emails in everyday with promises but still no real guarantee.

The statistics
The number one ranking website for any keyword has an average click through rate of 56%. So if 1,000 searches are done for that keyword each day, that’s 560 visitors each day on average.

Of these 560 visitors you get daily, 5% purchase a product – that’s 1 in 20 people. That’s a nice conversion rate and works out to be 112 new customers each day from that keyword. If the average purchase was $100, that’s $11,200 a day in revenue. That number 1 ranking is worth a lot of money.

Imagine if it was a popular keyword and it was being searched 100,000 times a day – 56,000 visitors a day and up to 11,200 new customers a day in an ideal scenario. That’s $1,120,000 a day. Now we’re starting to talk big business!!

Would your business benefit from this kind of traffic?
Any online business could benefit from this kind of traffic. On the Internet, targetted traffic is king. It earns money and it’s what some businesses survive on.

Competition is heavy in the search engines and the most profitable the keywords, that more likely there is going to be more competition.

Conclusion
SEO is definitely worth it and can take a company from being good to great! If your website is not search engine optimised, you are not helping the business at all.

If you have any questions about SEO, please contact me – nigel@burke.com.au

Many people may not have noticed this but Google has changed their homepage.

It’s not until you are told of the change that you would realize it.

Go to http://google.com but do not move your mouse. Only the search box and logo are visible. Once you move your mouse, the rest of the details appear.

This is just one of many changes Google has made that is not visible to the general Internet population. By writing and researching for this blog, I read about nearly every change.

Many of these changes are advanced and meaningless to users but as an Internet marketing expert like myself, they are important.

Your Internet marketing consultant should be aware of all the changes Google, Yahoo and Bing do so your website ranks at the top for your targetted keywords and stays at the top!

Google has introduced a new tool that allows you to check the speed of your website and improve the speed.

This is one of Google’s ways to give back to the Internet community by educating developers and designers to make better websites. This in turn is supposed to make the web a better place.

Tutorials
The site has some great tutorials and you can visit them here – Tutorials. Some example tutorials are -

• Use compression to make the web faster

• Capturing and analyzing browser paint events using Page Speed Activity

• Compressing your JavaScript with Closure Compiler

• CSS: Using every declaration just once

• How gzip compression works

• HTTP caching

• Improving website performance with Page Speed

• Make the mobile web faster

Participation
You can participate in discussions about making the web faster here – Share and discuss

Useful Tools
There are some fantastic tools the Google lists here. You can access the tools page here – Try useful tools. Some examples are -

• Page Speed
• Closure Compiler
• Closure Tools
• Cuzillion
• Xdebug
• AOL Page Test
• IBM Page Detailer
• Microsoft VRTA
• MySpace Performance Tracker
• Yahoo! YSlow

I highly recommend you check out the educational tutorials and test some of the tools they have made available and listing on the site.

I am often asked how to get higher rankings in search engines. Perhaps the customer has done everything possible to optimize their website, what next?

Backlinks are key to getting a great search engine ranking.

Next time you send an email to say ‘thank you for doing business with us’, maybe ask that customer to do a blog post if they have a blog. You can return the favour by adding a blog post about them. It’s a win-win situation for everyone – you both will get inbound links to your sites and a higher search engine ranking.

Try and get them to add some links to your site with the keywords you are targeting if possible.

You may not notice a big difference with one or two posts about your business but think if 20+ posts are done about your website. Now that will help you search engine ranking!

Your website can rank higher by simply knowing what elements Google and other search engines look at when indexing your page. When you are aware of these elements, you can make minor modifications to your website to produce a better ranking.

This is information that your SEO expert does not want you to know. SEO experts charge thousands of dollars to apply this to your website.

1. URL – The URL is the web address. You can name the page with the targeted keywords.
   Action – Name your pages accordingly.
   Example – http://yourdomain.com.au/keyword.html
    
2. Links – The links in the page should be related to the targeted keywords. These are just like references and by reading the references, you should be able to work out what the original page is about.
   Action – Name your links so they are related to the targeted keywords.
   Example – <a href=”apr.com.au”>Australian Produce Report</a>
    
3. The title tag – Do not simply place your business name here. Search engines rank the first words as the most important keywords for your site.
   Action – Place the most important keywords first and then your business name.
   Example – <title>keywords | page name | Business name</title>
    
4. The description tag – This does not have as much weight as it used to have but it is still important. Many search engines still look at this for keywords and even Google may use it as the description for your page in it’s search results.
   Action – Imagine that your visitor has not seen the page and write a good description about what the page is about.
   Example – <meta name=”description” content=”a great description of the page”>
    
5. The keywords tag – Search engines may not put much weight on to the specified keywords but it is still good to include it because every bit helps.
   Action – Enter a list of the most important keyworkds into this tag.
   Example – <meta name=”keywords” content=”a list of great keywords”>
    
6. The heading tags – Search engines look at the heading tags throughout your document and define what the page is about. Many websites make the mistake of not using the heading tags at all so the text looks like a long blurb to a search engine.
   Action – Using heading tags to break up your text into headings and subheadings using the search engine recognised way.
   Example – <h1>Big heading</h1> … text … <h2>Sub heading here</h2> … more text.
    
7. Bold text – Does your site use bold text? Using bolding on your most important keywords in your text. This will make it easier for a human reader and search engine bot to understand it – but make sure that it still looks good. Afterall, you need to make pages that humans can read and not pages that are simply only optimized and readable by search engine robots.
   Action – Use bolding for your most important keywords in your content
    
8. Text – Your chosen keywords should be the main discussion points on this page. If you have chosen a keyword but have not mentioned it in the content, should you be really targeting that keyword or maybe you need to add more content so you include the keywords.
   Action – Check that your target keywords are aligned with the content.
    
9. Alt text – Do your images utilize the image description element? If you load a web page without images, you should be able to make out what the images are about using the image description information. Search engines only read text and not images. The alt image value appears when you rest a mouse on an image.
   Action – Describe every image on the page and add your targeted keywords where you can. Remember that Braille readers and speech synthesizers use the alt text value so do not confuse these readers.
    

How could we forget these basic rules?
When making a web page, we often think about the marketing and the selling perspective of the page. We often forget that search engine robots need to read these pages too. On the other hand, we need to create pages that humans can understand as well.

Search engines try and replicate how a human would read a page but sometimes, they need a helping hand. By implementing these elements correctly on all your web pages means that search engines will recognise the content and targeted keywords more easily.

Conclusion
You now know how to optimize your on-page elements for your website. Now go update your website with your new found knowledge!

If you are not listed in either of the three main search engines, you are missing a lot of valuable traffic. That is traffic that could generate you sales and leads. But how do you know if you are listed? Do you just type your business name in and if you cannot find your link, then you must not be the search engine at all?

How do you check?
You can check by typing in the following to any search engine – site:yourdomain.com.au (changing the word yourdomain.com.au to your domain name (ie. site:avs.net.au)

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing

This will bring up a listing of all the entries that the search engine has of your website.

If you no results are found, then you are not listed in that search engine. In the near future, we will show you two ways that will get your site listed on all the major search engines.