SEO has become the key of success of any website in today’s world, but still there are people who ignore the SEO part of their website and try to either find some cheaper ways to optimize their website or self optimize their website without having knowledge of SEO. At Himshilp we do a thorough study of our client’s website and its competitor’s website and then perform research to find the title, description, keywords, H1 tags and content in the respective client’s site.
I want to list 10 golden rules which could be followed, in order to avoid common SEO mistakes to optimize the websites:
Avoid badly framed website title:
Website title plays an important role in determining the rank of a page by search engines. If your website has irrelevant title, then your webpage will be given less relevance by search engine. After scanning your page the search engine matches your content with the title and keywords of your page, so it is very important to take care of few things while designing the title.
1. One should never use a keyword more than once in the title.
2. Title tag should be framed with 10 - 60 characters, without any special characters.
3. Always place the important keywords in the title obeying the rule of leftward i.e. the
First word is best, second is second best, etc.
4. The title should always relate to the content of the webpage, its meta description and
meta keywords and should be legible by the user.
5. There should be distinct title and description of each page.
Don’t use duplicate/ insufficient content of the page:
Never design duplicate or bad content for your webpage. Insufficient or Duplicate content will not be tolerated by search engines, even your websites can be banned. Content is known as the king of the web. So always write a content which is unique, friendly. Then people would like to link to you. You can even hire people who write decent unique content by paying them some amount.
Check all your backlinks (Poor backlinks/ less backlinks are harmful):
The quantity of backlinks/ incoming links of a website represent its popularity. The number of backlinks replicates the number of votes caste for a particular website or a web page. Google consider backlinks as a very important factor to determine page rank. Don’t link to the websites which are not relevant to your website as it will not benefit you. Always link to a high page-rank website. Google doesn’t support link-exchange, so better not adopt it. One way quality backlinks are always better for SEO. There are various ways to increase the backlinks. The submission to Directories & Search Engine Submission is the easiest yet powerful and result oriented activity. Creating interesting blogs and articles are also very helpful to get quality backlinks to your website. The social networking profiles can also be used to bring backlinks to your website.
Check all your internal links:
Broken internal links create negative impact on SEO. Always validate all your internal links so that there are no broken links in your website. Using similar anchor text in all the links is also not advised. Anchor text is the text which is the visible part of a hyperlink, never use the same anchor text in all your links like click here or some thing which is irrelevant to that link. Anchor text link should contain keywords. Use hyphenated filenames, but not long ones - two or three hyphens only. And try to use keywords in the urls also.
Use header tags in the content appropriately:
One of the POSITIVE ON-Page SEO Factors is the usage of keyword in H1, H2 and H3 tags. We should use these tags in order to get the page optimized. But the problem with these tags is that they don’t look nice as such in the web browsers for h1, h2 tags are too large and h5, h6 are too small. So overall appearance of the webpage gets distorted. That’s why generally people ignore them. But with the advent of style sheets it has become very easy for the programmers to change the hierarchy of the tags, so that one can view them in the browser with the appropriate size. Also one should never use H1 tag more than once in a page.
Use keywords properly:
Keywords are wonderful weapon of your websites so never ignore them whether it is keywords in meta tag, url, meta description.
meta keywords: Never use common meta keywords in all the webpages of your website. It will be screened as duplicate content filter checks by the SE. The common rule for Keyword in keyword meta tag is to use less than 10 words. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be punished for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice. If not, it may be considered as spamming.
Keyword in URL: Often people ignore the proper usage keywords in url, and it is stuffed with irrelevant words. Always use appropriate description of the page content in the url assuming this hierarchy First word is the best, second is the second best, etc.
Keyword in description meta tag: Do not put similar descriptions for all the pages. It should be unique for all the pages and relevant to the page content. Ideally it should contain less than 200 chars.
High Keyword density in body text: Ideally keyword density should be 5- 20% - (all keywords/ total words). Individual keyword density should be 1 - 6% - (each keyword/ total words). But if you are thinking that using keyword everywhere will make the page more relevant then its wrong assumption. Do not stuff keywords unreasonably everywhere.
Make proper XML sitemap of the website:
Sitemaps helps you communicate with the SE. Website gets indexed in various search engines by XML sitemap. So always update your sitemap so that your webpages get indexed easily in the search engines.
Use < img> tag properly:
Most of the times the images are overlooked in SEO. Long and meaningless names of the images convey nothing to the search engine, try to incorporate some keywords in the image name so that the search engine will list them. Use alt tag to describe the images. ALT tags should contain a description of what the image is. It is a labeling device to translate your image into text for search engines. It also translates your image into a textual reference for users with visual handicaps. So use < img> tag carefully.
Don’t use too much of javascript where it is not required:
Use as much as clean HTML code instead of javascript code as the search engine could not translate java script.
Have patience:
There is no shortcut to get listed in top 10 for the selected keywords. It takes time for a page to get indexed in Google. So have patience and be vigilant. Publish unique quality content, by validating it and reinsure that it gets indexed properly in the search engine, this is an ongoing process, so keep changing the content of the website since if you will optimize your website for once and take a backseat then you can be out of index.
Finally be cautious of those internet marketing firms who give you 100% assurance in getting the pages indexed. Even Google says that there is no rule to get the 100% optimization and the rules to optimize the webpage are keeps on changing so be vigilant and take the appropriate step.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
How to improve the page rank of your website
Page Rank (often denoted by PR) is Google’s ranking software that calculates the relevance of a webpage with its content. Page Rank is a quantity (between 0 and 10) defined by Google that provides a rough estimate of the overall importance of a web page. The Google Toolbar can be obtained free of charge for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Google has a page rank of 10 which is the highest your site can attain. The PR of your site is updated about once of month when Google updates their database of web pages. It exports new backlinks, PageRank, or directory data approximately every three months.
One highly effective method for attracting more web traffic is to first optimize the design of your web site. This will increase your page rank because search engines love sites that have clean code, are fast loading and contain lots of well written content. This ultimately results in gaining traffic which leads to more sales, a sign you have developed a profitable web site.
Below are few factors which can be incorporated to improve page rank of your website:
1.Backlinks are vital
Links to and from your site are an important off page factor for determining PageRank. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be. You can always check out your backlinks by querying Google using its link operator.
Learn how to increase the backlinks
All the links are not Equal – Quality, Relevancy and Quantity of Links Effect PageRank
•Quality of LinksLinks with high PR, who link to your page, carry more weightage than links with equal or less PR.
•Relevancy of LinksHowever, relevancy of links is equally important. If your website is about selling online lays chips and you want to get a backlink from a interior designing website then it is irrelevant.
Google looks to title tag an on page criterion of incoming links to determine relevancy and similarity. Pages whose relevancies are equal or similar to your page are given more weightage.
Another relevancy criterion for incoming links is how pages link to you. Ideally, you want the incoming link to use your keyword in its anchor text. For instance, if you want to create a link for “how to increase backlinks” then anchor text should be increase backlinks not click here.
•Quantity of LinksIf a high-ranking page links to your page, it has value. However, if the high ranking page links to you and a hundred other pages it has less value. Essentially, the voting weight of the incoming link is divided among all the links on that page.
Another quantity issue is “link Mills”/ “Link Farms”. A link mill is a page with nothing but links on it. Linking to link farms or mills can be extremely harmful. These “bad neighborhoods” are often banned sites.
The final quantity issue is timeliness of links. Too many links to your site too quickly sends a flag to Google.
In addition to taking into account the number of links to your page and the ranking of the linking page, to compute a page’s PageRank, Google considers hundreds of other factors including
• the click through rate (CTR) of Google’s search results, cached pages, favorites on the Google Toolbar
• when your site acquired the links
• how fast a site is gaining links
• the stickiness of your site (i.e., the effectiveness of your site in retaining individual users)
2.Update your website every day by adding more unique content
If you site has unique content for the visitors they will surely revisit your site.
3.Include useful high-quality information on your site
Web copy that is well written will naturally drive more traffic. And Make sure that you have your targeted keywords included in the content on your pages in a natural way. It will help your website listed in various search engines. Website owners reading your content will naturally want to link to your site without even asking for a link back.
4.Provide inside linking to your website
Internal links are links between internal pages of a website. For example if you have written an article to enhance the page rank of the website it could be interlinked with another article which is about page rank.
5.Create sitemap for your website
Create sitemap (XML based for Google and text based for yahoo) then submit sitemap to Google and submit sitemap to Yahoo. Get a Google webmaster account and sign in there to see your website statistics. It will also tell you if your site is indexed or not, and your page rank in Google.
6.Publicize your site to everyone with whom you communicate
Add your site’s URL, e.g., www.himshilp.com, to every piece of communication you initiate. Your Web address should be listed everywhere that your phone/fax number and mailing address e.g.,
• Letterhead
• Business cards
• Newsletters
• Brochures
• Press Releases
• Fax cover sheets
• Email signatures
7.Write a newsletter and send it out.
Inform people what’s new or remarkable on your site. The newsletter will remind people about your site and encourage them to visit to find appealing content.
8.Provide a Rich Site Summary (RSS).
RSS is “a lightweight XML format for distributing news headlines and other content on the Web.”
In addition to making it easy for other sites to distribute your headlines and content, your RSS feed will be indexed by popular Blog search engines, including Technorati, BlogSearch, and Ask.com Bloglines.
9.Keyword density:
Keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. It has often been observed that Google considers keyword density a large factor in ranking pages in search engine results, more so than many other search engines. For example if your webpage is of “Page rank” and if you have used the keyword “page rank” only once in your webpage of thousand words then it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length. Then the page wont be listed for that particular keyword since its keyword density is low.
So in order to improve your site's placement in the search engine results one needs to work on the keyword density on his page.
10.Perform the necessary Keyword research.
Keyword research plays very important role in determining the page rank. Your web copy is filled with words that visitors enter in the search engines. Intertwine these words throughout the content of your web site.
11.Construct meta tags that include your targeted keywords
Make sure you write an attractive description for your description meta tag. This gets listed first to the visitors when search engine find your website relevant for that keyword. If the description does not capture your visitor’s attention immediately you will lose your visitor to a competing web site.
12.Construct a meaningful Title tag.
The title tag is what visitors will see at the top of the browser window when your site first appears. It is the most important tag to consider when designing your web site. Place your main keywords at the beginning of the title tag. Don't place you site's name first. Most visitors will not be searching for your site name. They find you with the keywords they entered in the search engines.
13.Use heading tags for the headings and sub headings of your web site content.
Incorporate your keywords in < h1 > to < h6 > tags. Search engines give a little more weightage to these tags. They also grab your visitor’s attention faster than normal text.
14.Name files using your targeted keywords
When naming your css, image, javascript files etc, include your targeted keywords. Don't use the same keywords again and again in every file. It may be flagged as keyword spamming by the search engines.
15.Include keywords in page and directory names
Instead of giving your pages generic names, be creative and incorporate keywords in their urls.
For example rather than giving names to your pages like page1.htm, page2.htm… try to incorporate the keywords in their names, like improve-page-rank.htm will be a better choice for a webpage which is about improving the page rank of a webpage.
This will help the search engines to identify the keywords in your page url. If a site owner links to this page you will benefit by already having your keywords in your web page address.
16.Use keywords in your link text
If the links on your page have relevant keyword text in them, your page will receive higher rankings in the search engine results than those sites that don't.
For example, a link on your with the text "improve your page rank" will cause your site to be listed earlier if a visitor searches for "page rank" than if the link simply said "click here."
17.Optimize your images
Try to avoid using images to display important names, content, or links. Search engines don't spider images only text. Use ALT tags if any of the main content on your web page can't be written in regular HTML.
18.Create external files
Instead of loading your site with lots of css or javascript code, place all the code in an external file between your header tags. This will drastically reduce the load time of your pages and allow the search engines to easily spider your site.
19.JavaScript & SEO
JavaScript and images, conveys nothing to a search engine. The second thing is size. Search Engines actually have a limit to how much page content they will crawl. For instance, Googlebot has a 100 kb limit. Even though the Googlebot directive is to search for keywords and phrases, which are placed after the 100 kb limit are invisible to it.
Don't overload the HEAD section of your page with styles and scripts. Instead, you should link to external files.
20.Proximity & Hierarchy
Before you start optimizing the individual pages consider the closeness of keywords and phrases to the beginning of a page. The importance of the webpage decreases from left to right and from top to bottom. So the top left part of a webpage has highest importance. The search engine spider will read the content which is in the beginning of the page BEFORE the actual content of the page. For example if you have links tabs in the page, it is more important than the actual content of the page. Whereas human visitors generally ignore the links first and directly jump to the content of the page.
Search Engines also consider textual hierarchy. Just like writing an exam paper, a search engine looks for code clues to understand the outline of your page. To a spider, text in heading tag is more important than the normal text. Similarly bold, italicized, or underlined text has more importance than the plain text.
Google periodically changes how it calculates a page’s importance, thereby resulting in shifts in rankings, known as a Google Dance.
Google has a page rank of 10 which is the highest your site can attain. The PR of your site is updated about once of month when Google updates their database of web pages. It exports new backlinks, PageRank, or directory data approximately every three months.
One highly effective method for attracting more web traffic is to first optimize the design of your web site. This will increase your page rank because search engines love sites that have clean code, are fast loading and contain lots of well written content. This ultimately results in gaining traffic which leads to more sales, a sign you have developed a profitable web site.
Below are few factors which can be incorporated to improve page rank of your website:
1.Backlinks are vital
Links to and from your site are an important off page factor for determining PageRank. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be. You can always check out your backlinks by querying Google using its link operator.
Learn how to increase the backlinks
All the links are not Equal – Quality, Relevancy and Quantity of Links Effect PageRank
•Quality of LinksLinks with high PR, who link to your page, carry more weightage than links with equal or less PR.
•Relevancy of LinksHowever, relevancy of links is equally important. If your website is about selling online lays chips and you want to get a backlink from a interior designing website then it is irrelevant.
Google looks to title tag an on page criterion of incoming links to determine relevancy and similarity. Pages whose relevancies are equal or similar to your page are given more weightage.
Another relevancy criterion for incoming links is how pages link to you. Ideally, you want the incoming link to use your keyword in its anchor text. For instance, if you want to create a link for “how to increase backlinks” then anchor text should be increase backlinks not click here.
•Quantity of LinksIf a high-ranking page links to your page, it has value. However, if the high ranking page links to you and a hundred other pages it has less value. Essentially, the voting weight of the incoming link is divided among all the links on that page.
Another quantity issue is “link Mills”/ “Link Farms”. A link mill is a page with nothing but links on it. Linking to link farms or mills can be extremely harmful. These “bad neighborhoods” are often banned sites.
The final quantity issue is timeliness of links. Too many links to your site too quickly sends a flag to Google.
In addition to taking into account the number of links to your page and the ranking of the linking page, to compute a page’s PageRank, Google considers hundreds of other factors including
• the click through rate (CTR) of Google’s search results, cached pages, favorites on the Google Toolbar
• when your site acquired the links
• how fast a site is gaining links
• the stickiness of your site (i.e., the effectiveness of your site in retaining individual users)
2.Update your website every day by adding more unique content
If you site has unique content for the visitors they will surely revisit your site.
3.Include useful high-quality information on your site
Web copy that is well written will naturally drive more traffic. And Make sure that you have your targeted keywords included in the content on your pages in a natural way. It will help your website listed in various search engines. Website owners reading your content will naturally want to link to your site without even asking for a link back.
4.Provide inside linking to your website
Internal links are links between internal pages of a website. For example if you have written an article to enhance the page rank of the website it could be interlinked with another article which is about page rank.
5.Create sitemap for your website
Create sitemap (XML based for Google and text based for yahoo) then submit sitemap to Google and submit sitemap to Yahoo. Get a Google webmaster account and sign in there to see your website statistics. It will also tell you if your site is indexed or not, and your page rank in Google.
6.Publicize your site to everyone with whom you communicate
Add your site’s URL, e.g., www.himshilp.com, to every piece of communication you initiate. Your Web address should be listed everywhere that your phone/fax number and mailing address e.g.,
• Letterhead
• Business cards
• Newsletters
• Brochures
• Press Releases
• Fax cover sheets
• Email signatures
7.Write a newsletter and send it out.
Inform people what’s new or remarkable on your site. The newsletter will remind people about your site and encourage them to visit to find appealing content.
8.Provide a Rich Site Summary (RSS).
RSS is “a lightweight XML format for distributing news headlines and other content on the Web.”
In addition to making it easy for other sites to distribute your headlines and content, your RSS feed will be indexed by popular Blog search engines, including Technorati, BlogSearch, and Ask.com Bloglines.
9.Keyword density:
Keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. It has often been observed that Google considers keyword density a large factor in ranking pages in search engine results, more so than many other search engines. For example if your webpage is of “Page rank” and if you have used the keyword “page rank” only once in your webpage of thousand words then it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length. Then the page wont be listed for that particular keyword since its keyword density is low.
So in order to improve your site's placement in the search engine results one needs to work on the keyword density on his page.
10.Perform the necessary Keyword research.
Keyword research plays very important role in determining the page rank. Your web copy is filled with words that visitors enter in the search engines. Intertwine these words throughout the content of your web site.
11.Construct meta tags that include your targeted keywords
Make sure you write an attractive description for your description meta tag. This gets listed first to the visitors when search engine find your website relevant for that keyword. If the description does not capture your visitor’s attention immediately you will lose your visitor to a competing web site.
12.Construct a meaningful Title tag.
The title tag is what visitors will see at the top of the browser window when your site first appears. It is the most important tag to consider when designing your web site. Place your main keywords at the beginning of the title tag. Don't place you site's name first. Most visitors will not be searching for your site name. They find you with the keywords they entered in the search engines.
13.Use heading tags for the headings and sub headings of your web site content.
Incorporate your keywords in < h1 > to < h6 > tags. Search engines give a little more weightage to these tags. They also grab your visitor’s attention faster than normal text.
14.Name files using your targeted keywords
When naming your css, image, javascript files etc, include your targeted keywords. Don't use the same keywords again and again in every file. It may be flagged as keyword spamming by the search engines.
15.Include keywords in page and directory names
Instead of giving your pages generic names, be creative and incorporate keywords in their urls.
For example rather than giving names to your pages like page1.htm, page2.htm… try to incorporate the keywords in their names, like improve-page-rank.htm will be a better choice for a webpage which is about improving the page rank of a webpage.
This will help the search engines to identify the keywords in your page url. If a site owner links to this page you will benefit by already having your keywords in your web page address.
16.Use keywords in your link text
If the links on your page have relevant keyword text in them, your page will receive higher rankings in the search engine results than those sites that don't.
For example, a link on your with the text "improve your page rank" will cause your site to be listed earlier if a visitor searches for "page rank" than if the link simply said "click here."
17.Optimize your images
Try to avoid using images to display important names, content, or links. Search engines don't spider images only text. Use ALT tags if any of the main content on your web page can't be written in regular HTML.
18.Create external files
Instead of loading your site with lots of css or javascript code, place all the code in an external file between your header tags. This will drastically reduce the load time of your pages and allow the search engines to easily spider your site.
19.JavaScript & SEO
JavaScript and images, conveys nothing to a search engine. The second thing is size. Search Engines actually have a limit to how much page content they will crawl. For instance, Googlebot has a 100 kb limit. Even though the Googlebot directive is to search for keywords and phrases, which are placed after the 100 kb limit are invisible to it.
Don't overload the HEAD section of your page with styles and scripts. Instead, you should link to external files.
20.Proximity & Hierarchy
Before you start optimizing the individual pages consider the closeness of keywords and phrases to the beginning of a page. The importance of the webpage decreases from left to right and from top to bottom. So the top left part of a webpage has highest importance. The search engine spider will read the content which is in the beginning of the page BEFORE the actual content of the page. For example if you have links tabs in the page, it is more important than the actual content of the page. Whereas human visitors generally ignore the links first and directly jump to the content of the page.
Search Engines also consider textual hierarchy. Just like writing an exam paper, a search engine looks for code clues to understand the outline of your page. To a spider, text in heading tag is more important than the normal text. Similarly bold, italicized, or underlined text has more importance than the plain text.
Google periodically changes how it calculates a page’s importance, thereby resulting in shifts in rankings, known as a Google Dance.
Benefits of using Twitter
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the followers. That’s why information on Twitter is short, to the point and effective. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. You can access Twitter via Web, Desktop Applications and even SMS. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
I started using tweeter some time ago. Surprisingly after few days of posting some tweets it started getting indexed in Google. While Google continues to dominate the world of “search”, it has a long way to go in offering real-time search capabilities.
Twitter is a powerful communication platform providing social networkers the opportunity to post updates in real-real time. The growth of twitter has been so phenomenal that Google also started paying attention and it is indexing Tweets. Many Twitter pages and individual tweets can be seen on the first page of Google.
Then I started learning more about it. Rather than using it just as a social networking platform, if used properly, it can benefit you in so many ways including by boosting your personal brand and enhancing website traffic.
I want to list down some of the methods by which Twitter can benefit us:
1.A Powerful Tool for Obtaining Information / news. Twitter users often link to useful sites or articles and can be a source of scoops and alternative news. This is very useful for active social news participants as they can subscribe to Twitter feeds for specific websites/conferences, which allows them to receive and view content quickly.Twitter can be quite an effective search tool for researching any kind of information. The results can complement other methods or sources of information. Twitter has a wide range of users, who constantly update Twitter with new information on different niches.
2.To reinforce Personal Brand and awareness. Twitter is a social media platform which has the primary advantage of developing a social brand that is well-connected and accessible. Due its vast usage, Twitter can be a used for promoting your products and services and establish your brand. If you have established business you can use Twitter to enhance your brand image. On the other hand if you have a smaller business with limited brand awareness then Twitter can be excellent for promoting and establishing your brand among enormous audience.
3.Get Feedback. Twitter provides you with an opportunity to join a group of interest by following others who are influential within your niche. Twitter also allows businesses to communicate with customers and receive feedback in a casual and cost effective manner. It can prove useful in understanding and obtaining consumer opinion about new products or services or new ideas. You can also use Twitter to communicate new ideas with people and test public opinion. Bloggers sometimes use Twitter to discuss ideas for new posts.
4.Use it as HR tool to Recruit People. Want to hire a good web analyst, web designer, or programmer? Send out a tweet asking for recommendations. This is a very quick and easy way to hire freelancers or even companies based on familiar recommendations.
5.Marketing Opportunities. Twitter can be used in promoting your products and services. It is a cost effective method to increase awareness about your products or services. You can use it to inform customers about any new announcement or special offers. Twitter offers all the advantages of traditional text message marketing and more. It can prove to be a useful tool for conducting market research by better understanding of potential or existing customers.
6.Boost your website traffic. Twitter can be used to direct traffic to your websites. If you tweet about your website, the message will spread faster and further as other active users pick it up and re-tweet it. Bloggers often use Twitter to inform their audience of any new posts on their blog by posting links on Twitter. Thus Twitter can be seen as a traffic generation tool. The placement of links within profiles and conversations can direct visitors to a specific website and is especially powerful if you pitch to early adopters and influencers.
7.Make new friends. Twitter has a built-in function for you to befriend and track the messages of other users. This is a simple way for you connect with like minded people outside of your usual circle. A Twitter association can be developed into a long term acquaintance.
8.Spreading Social Network. Twitter is an excellent tool to help bloggers share links to content which is of mutual interest to like minded people. On a personal level Twitter allows one to communicate with friends and family or close network of connections. On an organizational level Twitter allows colleagues who are not co-located to communicate with each other or businesses to communicate with their customers. With Twitter it is also possible to target a specific niche or audience by following others from your industry. It can thus allow a business to build contacts within the industry. Communities have developed around many of Twitter groups or niches. Twitter can be used to establish reliable and long term relationships for future benefits such as testimonials or peer recommendations.
9.Get Votes. Send a link to your stories you’ve submitted in other social news sites like Digg. Your followers might vote up the stories if they agree with it. This allows you to acquire more support for your efforts on other social media websites
10.Event Updates. Twitter can be used as a means to inform event participants and latest event happenings/changes by entrepreneurs. This is a stress-free way to broadcast information. Businesses have also used Twitter effectively to measure the performance of campaigns.
11.Promotion. Twitter can be used as a promotional tool to announce offline endeavors or upcoming online events (webinars, virtual tradeshows etc). If you are an e-commerce site, perhaps you have a deal of the day or seasonal offers where you can promote these deals. The fact is you do not want to be too promotional, but Twitter does present the opportunity to promote your products or service and brand to your friends.
12.SEO Boost. If you have good content on your website and you want to drive additional traffic to this content on your website, you can use Twitter to do so. A quick tweet with the URL can help drive additional traffic to a preferred landing page on your site to help persuade the conversion on your site.
13.Find future Prospects online. Twitter allows you to interact with potential prospects and your target audience. While you do not want to be in direct touch all of the time, Twitter does allow you to engage with your prospects by re-tweeting their posts or responding to something that they may have tweeted about. Discretion and tact is needed in this area.
14.Twitter and Mobile. Since Twitter is very simple to use and is limited to 140 characters, mobile use with Twitter is also easy. You can both send and receive updates what you and your friends are doing on the go using a simple SMS. Twitter can be a great mobile communication tool. As we know in business, this can be a pretty powerful thing.
15.Offer live exposure. Twitter’s message size limit prevents detailed coverage of events but it can allow you to provide real-time commentary which may help to spark further discussion or interest on the event as other Twitter users spread the message. Very useful for citizen journalism.
In short, Twitter allows you to monitor how influencers think or feel, you can also get into their attention zone via active networking. For businesses, Twitter is another channel which connects current and potential customers with your product or brand. It allows deeply infiltration into the lifestyles of interested participants, which helps to build brand persistence/loyalty. So twitter can be used a tool to achieve simple aim of tracking and directing attention from various groups of your interest and in turn drive business.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Boost traffic to your website by optimizing images
In terms of esthetics, images are an integral part of website design. They provide site visitors instant visual stimulation. In terms of SEO, images can be optimized and bring additional visitors to a website.
But images are often overlooked in SEO. But if we see next to regular search on a search engine Image Search is the fastest growing vertical search in the space. Compared to shopping, news, blogging, etc., image search has them beat by a mile. However, what's even more important about image search, is how the search engines are utilizing and incorporating them into their regular search results.
Nowadays images are incorporated in a lot of different ways. You'll see images coming up with the news one boxes, with descriptions of videos, a group of images could appear at the bottom of a page, as opposed to the top of the page. All of the search engines are striving to make the results more relevant and incorporating images into the results is definitely part of that strategy.
Here are few tips to optimize your site’s images for the search engines.
• Names of the images:
Avoid using any needless, uninformative words such as 'and', 'thus', 'or' and so on because they makes your content longer and complicated and make the reader lose interest. Make file names as clear and short as possible. The image name will appear beneath the graphic image in search results. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file Do NOT expect your photo editing program's default settings to give you optimized file names Default names communicate nothing to the search engines on their own. Make sure to set up your own file naming structure in advance. Use dashes between the words of images, rather than underscores. Nobody likes detailed data. Try to think of keywords that usually grab your attention and frame the filenames.
• Use Alt attribute of the img tag:
Search Engines only know what you tell them. Therefore, if we want a search engine to understand that a graphic is an ad, decorated text or coupon for your services you have to tell it. We do this via ALT (alternative) tags. ALT tags should contain a description of what the image is. It is a labeling device to translate your image into text for search engines. It also translates your image into a textual reference for users with visual handicaps. Finally, if a user has images turned off or a slow connection, they are presented with your textual alternative so your page remains relevantly contextual.
Search engine also gives importance to alt tag to determine the page rank of the website. Google indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images. The ALT attribute is also shown when the user pass over the image with his mouse.
Things to keep in mind while preparing alt tags for images:
1. Alt text is the best description of the image.
2. It should be short and simple. Avoid giving unnecessary details using alt tag.
3. If your image is decorative text then just use the same text in alt text.
4. If the image is the bullets we can leave the alt text blank.
5. Use two or three keywords at the most while optimizing images with alt text. Don’t use so many keywords.
Alt tag is a useful source to serve the problem of many web browsers displaying the image differently, and some browsers even don’t support some types of images in such cases alt tag is very useful.
• Robots.txt file:
Ensure that the folder you are storing your images in is not blocked by your robots.txt file. Store your navigational and "structural" type graphics in one folder, and block that from the spiders, store the pictures of products, events, or news related images in another folder and open that one to the spiders.
• Image freshness
Keep images fresh. If you're targeting high popularity keywords it's worth experimenting with re-uploading images. Image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and could affect relevancy. Re-uploading your images to keep them fresh.
• Reasonable image file size
The image size also plays an important role while loading the page. If the image is too big the page will take too long to get displayed, always specify height and width of the image so that the image will be loaded easily.
• Limited number of images per page
Don’t use too many images in a webpage it makes your webpage slow.
• Check images aren't being filtered out in Google Safe Search Filter
• Use a Caption for Your Image:
Placing a small caption directly under, on top or on the side of your image will help queue the search engines what the image is about. With a caption, you can be a little more descriptive about the picture than with the alt attribute, but again, make it flow natural.
• Design unique images to differentiate yourself
• Include Images With Articles, & Press Releases:
If you are sending out an article or a press release, don't forget to include an image, or a url to an image that the news outlets can utilized for their version of your news. By supplying the link to the image, it can encourage them to link to the image itself straight from your own website. Adding images to articles and press releases makes them more appealing to the reader.Boost internal linking and traffic by linking images to the relevant articles.
But images are often overlooked in SEO. But if we see next to regular search on a search engine Image Search is the fastest growing vertical search in the space. Compared to shopping, news, blogging, etc., image search has them beat by a mile. However, what's even more important about image search, is how the search engines are utilizing and incorporating them into their regular search results.
Nowadays images are incorporated in a lot of different ways. You'll see images coming up with the news one boxes, with descriptions of videos, a group of images could appear at the bottom of a page, as opposed to the top of the page. All of the search engines are striving to make the results more relevant and incorporating images into the results is definitely part of that strategy.
Here are few tips to optimize your site’s images for the search engines.
• Names of the images:
Avoid using any needless, uninformative words such as 'and', 'thus', 'or' and so on because they makes your content longer and complicated and make the reader lose interest. Make file names as clear and short as possible. The image name will appear beneath the graphic image in search results. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file Do NOT expect your photo editing program's default settings to give you optimized file names Default names communicate nothing to the search engines on their own. Make sure to set up your own file naming structure in advance. Use dashes between the words of images, rather than underscores. Nobody likes detailed data. Try to think of keywords that usually grab your attention and frame the filenames.
• Use Alt attribute of the img tag:
Search Engines only know what you tell them. Therefore, if we want a search engine to understand that a graphic is an ad, decorated text or coupon for your services you have to tell it. We do this via ALT (alternative) tags. ALT tags should contain a description of what the image is. It is a labeling device to translate your image into text for search engines. It also translates your image into a textual reference for users with visual handicaps. Finally, if a user has images turned off or a slow connection, they are presented with your textual alternative so your page remains relevantly contextual.
Search engine also gives importance to alt tag to determine the page rank of the website. Google indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images. The ALT attribute is also shown when the user pass over the image with his mouse.
Things to keep in mind while preparing alt tags for images:
1. Alt text is the best description of the image.
2. It should be short and simple. Avoid giving unnecessary details using alt tag.
3. If your image is decorative text then just use the same text in alt text.
4. If the image is the bullets we can leave the alt text blank.
5. Use two or three keywords at the most while optimizing images with alt text. Don’t use so many keywords.
Alt tag is a useful source to serve the problem of many web browsers displaying the image differently, and some browsers even don’t support some types of images in such cases alt tag is very useful.
• Robots.txt file:
Ensure that the folder you are storing your images in is not blocked by your robots.txt file. Store your navigational and "structural" type graphics in one folder, and block that from the spiders, store the pictures of products, events, or news related images in another folder and open that one to the spiders.
• Image freshness
Keep images fresh. If you're targeting high popularity keywords it's worth experimenting with re-uploading images. Image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and could affect relevancy. Re-uploading your images to keep them fresh.
• Reasonable image file size
The image size also plays an important role while loading the page. If the image is too big the page will take too long to get displayed, always specify height and width of the image so that the image will be loaded easily.
• Limited number of images per page
Don’t use too many images in a webpage it makes your webpage slow.
• Check images aren't being filtered out in Google Safe Search Filter
• Use a Caption for Your Image:
Placing a small caption directly under, on top or on the side of your image will help queue the search engines what the image is about. With a caption, you can be a little more descriptive about the picture than with the alt attribute, but again, make it flow natural.
• Design unique images to differentiate yourself
• Include Images With Articles, & Press Releases:
If you are sending out an article or a press release, don't forget to include an image, or a url to an image that the news outlets can utilized for their version of your news. By supplying the link to the image, it can encourage them to link to the image itself straight from your own website. Adding images to articles and press releases makes them more appealing to the reader.Boost internal linking and traffic by linking images to the relevant articles.
Friday, July 17, 2009
How to enhance the speed of your website
A website must be simple in navigation and structure, pleasant, functional, have a good page rank, but most of all, it should be fast. A fast website is the key to increase the user experience and this brings you returning and happy visitors to your website. By following the following simple tricks we can optimize your website for speed with almost no cost at all.
Optimize the images in your website
It is well known fact that loading time of any website directly affects the user’s response to a website; viewers hate to wait for long to get the website to be fully loaded.
Images play a vital role on the loading of a website so it’s very important to take optimal size of the image in order to load the webpage faster. Photoshop and similar image editing software include a feature called “Save for the web”. Always use this feature since it will reduce the image size and load time substantially.
Image formats
In order to optimize the images it is very important to choose the right format. There are different formats based on the type and size of the image, which can be used effectively by following these rules:
JPEG: Stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. This format was created for photographs and fine art-work. You should use JPEG images whenever you are displaying a photo or a true-color image. Use a 50% compression rate for optimal results with these images.
GIF: Stands for Graphics Interchange Format. The GIF is most favorable format for internet, mainly because of its small size. GIF is also used for animated images. JPEG images support millions of colors while GIF ones will integrate a maximum of 256 colors. You should use this format for flat-color images like logos, buttons or text images.
PNG: Stands for Portable Network Graphics. This format was specifically made to replace GIF images on the internet. The main advantage of PNG images over GIF ones is that they support 24-bit colors and alpha transparency. That said not all the browsers recognize some of its features. You should use the PNG format for simple images that require more than 256 colors.
Use the height and width tags
When you use images or tables on your pages you should always include the height and width tags. If the browser does not see those tags it will need to figure the size of the image, then load the image and then load the rest of the page. Here is an example of code containing those tags:
< img src = " himshilp_logo.gif " width="197" height="71" border="0" alt="" />
When the height and width tags are included the browser will automatically know the size of the image. As a consequence it will be able to hold a place for the image and load the rest of the page contemporaneously. Apart from the improvement on the load time of the page this method is also more user friendly since the visitor can start reading the text or other information while the image is being downloaded.
Don’t scale images in HTML
Don't use a bigger image than you need just because you can set the width and height in HTML. If you need
< img width="100" height="100" src = "banner.jpg" alt="banner" />
then your image (banner.jpg) should be 100x100px rather than a scaled down 500x500px image.
Reduce cookie size
HTTP cookies are used for a variety of reasons such as authentication and personalization. Information about cookies is exchanged in the HTTP headers between web servers and browsers. It's important to
• Keep the size of cookies as low as possible to minimize the impact on the user's response time.
• Eliminate unnecessary cookies
• Be mindful of setting cookies at the appropriate domain level so other sub-domains are not affected
• Set an Expires date appropriately. An earlier Expires date or none removes the cookie sooner, improving the user response time.
Flush the Buffer early
When users request a page, it can take anywhere from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to stitch together the HTML page. During this time, the browser is idle as it waits for the data to arrive. In PHP you have the function flush(). It allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that the browser can start fetching components while your backend is busy with the rest of the HTML page. The benefit is mainly seen on busy backends or light frontends.
A good place to consider flushing is right after the HEAD because the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce and it allows you to include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend is still processing.
Remove duplicate java scripts
Duplicate scripts hurt performance by creating unnecessary HTTP requests and wasted JavaScript execution.
In addition to generating wasteful HTTP requests, time is wasted evaluating the script multiple times.
One way to avoid accidentally including the same script twice is to implement a script management module in your templating system. The typical way to include a script is to use the SCRIPT tag in your HTML page.
< script type = "text/javascript" src= "menu_1.0.18.js" >
< / script>
An alternative in PHP would be to create a function called insertScript.
< ?php insertScript( "menu.js") ? >
In addition to preventing the same script from being inserted multiple times, this function could handle other issues with scripts, such as dependency checking and adding version numbers to script filenames to support far future Expires headers
Put Stylesheets at the Top
Moving stylesheets to the document HEAD makes pages appear to be loading faster. This is because putting stylesheets in the HEAD allows the page to render progressively.
This is especially important for pages with a lot of content and for users on slower Internet connections. The importance of giving users visual feedback, such as progress indicators, has been well researched and documented. In our case the HTML page is the progress indicator! When the browser loads the page progressively the header, the navigation bar, the logo at the top, etc. all serve as visual feedback for the user who is waiting for the page. This improves the overall user experience.
The problem with putting stylesheets near the bottom of the document is that it prohibits progressive rendering in many browsers, including Internet Explorer. These browsers block rendering to avoid having to redraw elements of the page if their styles change. The user is stuck viewing a blank white page.
Put Scripts at the Bottom
The problem caused by scripts is that they block parallel downloads. If you serve your images from multiple hostnames, you can get more than two downloads to occur in parallel. While a script is downloading, however, the browser won't start any other downloads, even on different hostnames.
In some situations it's not easy to move scripts to the bottom. If, for example, the script uses document.write to insert part of the page's content, it can't be moved lower in the page. There might also be scoping issues. In many cases, there are ways to workaround these situations.
Flush the Buffer Early
When users request a page, it can take anywhere from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to stitch together the HTML page. During this time, the browser is idle as it waits for the data to arrive. In PHP you have the function flush(). It allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that the browser can start fetching components while your backend is busy with the rest of the HTML page. The benefit is mainly seen on busy backends or light frontends.
A good place to consider flushing is right after the HEAD because the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce and it allows you to include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend is still processing.
Example:
... < !-- css, js -->
< / head >
< ? php flush(); ? >
< body >
... < !-- content -->
Make favicon.ico small and cacheable
The favicon.ico is an image that stays in the root of your server. It's a necessary evil the browser will always request it, even if you don’t care about it, so make sure that this file is always present in the server. This image also interferes with the download sequence, so if you are using a favicon in your website make sure that it's small, preferably under 1K.
Optimizing CSS
Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) make websites much more structured because they allow the browsers to cache style-related information from the .css file directly, eliminating the need to read that information every time a single page is loaded. Even if Style Sheets are naturally more efficient than HTML tables you can still optimize the CSS code to make your website cleaner and faster. Remove whitespaces as and when possible. Avoid repetition of the code wherever possible to make your style-sheets lighter. Use Shorthand Properties, Take Advantage of Your Inheritance, Use Grouping, Cut the Comments, Apply Styles Wisely.
Use a slash to display a directory
When a server opens a link in the form of “http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles” it will need to figure what kind of file or webpage is contained on that address, wasting time on the process. If instead of using that link you include a slash (”/”) at the end like “http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/” the web server will already know that the link points to a directory, reducing the time to load the page.
Reduce the HTTP Requests
When a user is opening your website every object on the page (e.g. images or scripts) will require a visit to the server. Those HTTP requests will delay the response time of your site, and if you are loading number of objects this delay can add up to several seconds.
By reducing the number of objects on your website, we can reduce the delay from HTTP requests. Delete unnecessary images, headers, styling features and the like. If possible you can also combine 2 or more adjacent images into a single one.
Secondly make sure that your requests for external files or scripts are combined in a single location.
Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
We should refer the following as a rule:
• For static components: implement "Never expire" policy by setting far future Expires header.
• For dynamic components: use an appropriate Cache-Control header to help the browser with conditional requests .
Web page designs are getting richer and richer, which means more scripts, stylesheets, images, and Flash in the page. A first-time visitor to your page may have to make several HTTP requests, but by using the Expires header you make those components cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers are most often used with images, but they should be used on all components including scripts, stylesheets, and Flash components.
Avoid too many banner ads
Don't waste your valuable website real estate on flashing banner ads, as they are most of the time ignored by the visitors, and they make your webpage heavy to be loaded. Provide more valuable content instead. Then mix in some relevant affiliate links within your website's body content, this helps your website visitors feel that they want to buy instead of feeling like they are being pushed into buying.
Avoid background music
If you really want your visitors to remain long on your web site, reading your content, the very least you should do is ensure that they aren't put off by annoying background music looping on your website. Not only this type of music will bother the visitor but delay your webpage’s loading time. If you really feel you must use background music at least make sure visitors have some control over it - give them the option of volume or muting controls at the very least.
Minify Javascript and CSS
Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. When code is minified all comments are removed, as well as unneeded white space characters (space, newline, and tab). In the case of JavaScript, this improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced. Two popular tools for minifying JavaScript code are JSMin and YUI Compressor. The YUI compressor can also minify CSS.
Obfuscation is an alternative optimization that can be applied to source code. It's more complex than minification and thus more likely to generate bugs as a result of the obfuscation step itself.
Avoid redirects
Redirects slow down the user experience. Inserting a redirect between the user and the HTML document delays everything in the page since nothing in the page can be rendered and no components can start being downloaded until the HTML document has arrived.
Webserver Log Analysis:
The logs that your webserver keep are an open book to teach where and when errors occur. The most important part in the logs are the 404 and 500 errors that represent a missing page. It means that a visitor or a web crawler requested that page and it's missing. This again does not have so much of an effect when it comes to speed but it's a good idea to try and repair the bottlenecks at least for the sake of user experience. Almost any web hosting provider offer a log analizer such as awstats
Surely there can be many other methods also like avoid using flash as much as possible because, usually, flash loads harder due to their sizes. Remove the HTML comments from your pages, because comments can slow your website down. Big or small, comments have something to say when it comes to page size. Actually you should remove everything from your website which you don’t really require. Avoid nested tables, it effects browser’s reading time. Avoid full page tables for fast rendering. The browser won't show anything until it's read the whole thing that way. For a faster loading webpage, either use multiple tables (not nested) or put some content above the main table to make your content in the first table show up faster. In this way you can provide something to read to your visitors while the rest of your page loads.
I think by reading this article you must have got a nice idea of restructuring your website in a way so that it takes less time to get displayed and in turn it will also increase the traffic to your website, which is truly essential in today’s age.
Optimize the images in your website
It is well known fact that loading time of any website directly affects the user’s response to a website; viewers hate to wait for long to get the website to be fully loaded.
Images play a vital role on the loading of a website so it’s very important to take optimal size of the image in order to load the webpage faster. Photoshop and similar image editing software include a feature called “Save for the web”. Always use this feature since it will reduce the image size and load time substantially.
Image formats
In order to optimize the images it is very important to choose the right format. There are different formats based on the type and size of the image, which can be used effectively by following these rules:
JPEG: Stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. This format was created for photographs and fine art-work. You should use JPEG images whenever you are displaying a photo or a true-color image. Use a 50% compression rate for optimal results with these images.
GIF: Stands for Graphics Interchange Format. The GIF is most favorable format for internet, mainly because of its small size. GIF is also used for animated images. JPEG images support millions of colors while GIF ones will integrate a maximum of 256 colors. You should use this format for flat-color images like logos, buttons or text images.
PNG: Stands for Portable Network Graphics. This format was specifically made to replace GIF images on the internet. The main advantage of PNG images over GIF ones is that they support 24-bit colors and alpha transparency. That said not all the browsers recognize some of its features. You should use the PNG format for simple images that require more than 256 colors.
Use the height and width tags
When you use images or tables on your pages you should always include the height and width tags. If the browser does not see those tags it will need to figure the size of the image, then load the image and then load the rest of the page. Here is an example of code containing those tags:
< img src = " himshilp_logo.gif " width="197" height="71" border="0" alt="" />
When the height and width tags are included the browser will automatically know the size of the image. As a consequence it will be able to hold a place for the image and load the rest of the page contemporaneously. Apart from the improvement on the load time of the page this method is also more user friendly since the visitor can start reading the text or other information while the image is being downloaded.
Don’t scale images in HTML
Don't use a bigger image than you need just because you can set the width and height in HTML. If you need
< img width="100" height="100" src = "banner.jpg" alt="banner" />
then your image (banner.jpg) should be 100x100px rather than a scaled down 500x500px image.
Reduce cookie size
HTTP cookies are used for a variety of reasons such as authentication and personalization. Information about cookies is exchanged in the HTTP headers between web servers and browsers. It's important to
• Keep the size of cookies as low as possible to minimize the impact on the user's response time.
• Eliminate unnecessary cookies
• Be mindful of setting cookies at the appropriate domain level so other sub-domains are not affected
• Set an Expires date appropriately. An earlier Expires date or none removes the cookie sooner, improving the user response time.
Flush the Buffer early
When users request a page, it can take anywhere from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to stitch together the HTML page. During this time, the browser is idle as it waits for the data to arrive. In PHP you have the function flush(). It allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that the browser can start fetching components while your backend is busy with the rest of the HTML page. The benefit is mainly seen on busy backends or light frontends.
A good place to consider flushing is right after the HEAD because the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce and it allows you to include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend is still processing.
Remove duplicate java scripts
Duplicate scripts hurt performance by creating unnecessary HTTP requests and wasted JavaScript execution.
In addition to generating wasteful HTTP requests, time is wasted evaluating the script multiple times.
One way to avoid accidentally including the same script twice is to implement a script management module in your templating system. The typical way to include a script is to use the SCRIPT tag in your HTML page.
< script type = "text/javascript" src= "menu_1.0.18.js" >
< / script>
An alternative in PHP would be to create a function called insertScript.
< ?php insertScript( "menu.js") ? >
In addition to preventing the same script from being inserted multiple times, this function could handle other issues with scripts, such as dependency checking and adding version numbers to script filenames to support far future Expires headers
Put Stylesheets at the Top
Moving stylesheets to the document HEAD makes pages appear to be loading faster. This is because putting stylesheets in the HEAD allows the page to render progressively.
This is especially important for pages with a lot of content and for users on slower Internet connections. The importance of giving users visual feedback, such as progress indicators, has been well researched and documented. In our case the HTML page is the progress indicator! When the browser loads the page progressively the header, the navigation bar, the logo at the top, etc. all serve as visual feedback for the user who is waiting for the page. This improves the overall user experience.
The problem with putting stylesheets near the bottom of the document is that it prohibits progressive rendering in many browsers, including Internet Explorer. These browsers block rendering to avoid having to redraw elements of the page if their styles change. The user is stuck viewing a blank white page.
Put Scripts at the Bottom
The problem caused by scripts is that they block parallel downloads. If you serve your images from multiple hostnames, you can get more than two downloads to occur in parallel. While a script is downloading, however, the browser won't start any other downloads, even on different hostnames.
In some situations it's not easy to move scripts to the bottom. If, for example, the script uses document.write to insert part of the page's content, it can't be moved lower in the page. There might also be scoping issues. In many cases, there are ways to workaround these situations.
Flush the Buffer Early
When users request a page, it can take anywhere from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to stitch together the HTML page. During this time, the browser is idle as it waits for the data to arrive. In PHP you have the function flush(). It allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that the browser can start fetching components while your backend is busy with the rest of the HTML page. The benefit is mainly seen on busy backends or light frontends.
A good place to consider flushing is right after the HEAD because the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce and it allows you to include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend is still processing.
Example:
... < !-- css, js -->
< / head >
< ? php flush(); ? >
< body >
... < !-- content -->
Make favicon.ico small and cacheable
The favicon.ico is an image that stays in the root of your server. It's a necessary evil the browser will always request it, even if you don’t care about it, so make sure that this file is always present in the server. This image also interferes with the download sequence, so if you are using a favicon in your website make sure that it's small, preferably under 1K.
Optimizing CSS
Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) make websites much more structured because they allow the browsers to cache style-related information from the .css file directly, eliminating the need to read that information every time a single page is loaded. Even if Style Sheets are naturally more efficient than HTML tables you can still optimize the CSS code to make your website cleaner and faster. Remove whitespaces as and when possible. Avoid repetition of the code wherever possible to make your style-sheets lighter. Use Shorthand Properties, Take Advantage of Your Inheritance, Use Grouping, Cut the Comments, Apply Styles Wisely.
Use a slash to display a directory
When a server opens a link in the form of “http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles” it will need to figure what kind of file or webpage is contained on that address, wasting time on the process. If instead of using that link you include a slash (”/”) at the end like “http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/” the web server will already know that the link points to a directory, reducing the time to load the page.
Reduce the HTTP Requests
When a user is opening your website every object on the page (e.g. images or scripts) will require a visit to the server. Those HTTP requests will delay the response time of your site, and if you are loading number of objects this delay can add up to several seconds.
By reducing the number of objects on your website, we can reduce the delay from HTTP requests. Delete unnecessary images, headers, styling features and the like. If possible you can also combine 2 or more adjacent images into a single one.
Secondly make sure that your requests for external files or scripts are combined in a single location.
Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
We should refer the following as a rule:
• For static components: implement "Never expire" policy by setting far future Expires header.
• For dynamic components: use an appropriate Cache-Control header to help the browser with conditional requests .
Web page designs are getting richer and richer, which means more scripts, stylesheets, images, and Flash in the page. A first-time visitor to your page may have to make several HTTP requests, but by using the Expires header you make those components cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers are most often used with images, but they should be used on all components including scripts, stylesheets, and Flash components.
Avoid too many banner ads
Don't waste your valuable website real estate on flashing banner ads, as they are most of the time ignored by the visitors, and they make your webpage heavy to be loaded. Provide more valuable content instead. Then mix in some relevant affiliate links within your website's body content, this helps your website visitors feel that they want to buy instead of feeling like they are being pushed into buying.
Avoid background music
If you really want your visitors to remain long on your web site, reading your content, the very least you should do is ensure that they aren't put off by annoying background music looping on your website. Not only this type of music will bother the visitor but delay your webpage’s loading time. If you really feel you must use background music at least make sure visitors have some control over it - give them the option of volume or muting controls at the very least.
Minify Javascript and CSS
Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. When code is minified all comments are removed, as well as unneeded white space characters (space, newline, and tab). In the case of JavaScript, this improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced. Two popular tools for minifying JavaScript code are JSMin and YUI Compressor. The YUI compressor can also minify CSS.
Obfuscation is an alternative optimization that can be applied to source code. It's more complex than minification and thus more likely to generate bugs as a result of the obfuscation step itself.
Avoid redirects
Redirects slow down the user experience. Inserting a redirect between the user and the HTML document delays everything in the page since nothing in the page can be rendered and no components can start being downloaded until the HTML document has arrived.
Webserver Log Analysis:
The logs that your webserver keep are an open book to teach where and when errors occur. The most important part in the logs are the 404 and 500 errors that represent a missing page. It means that a visitor or a web crawler requested that page and it's missing. This again does not have so much of an effect when it comes to speed but it's a good idea to try and repair the bottlenecks at least for the sake of user experience. Almost any web hosting provider offer a log analizer such as awstats
Surely there can be many other methods also like avoid using flash as much as possible because, usually, flash loads harder due to their sizes. Remove the HTML comments from your pages, because comments can slow your website down. Big or small, comments have something to say when it comes to page size. Actually you should remove everything from your website which you don’t really require. Avoid nested tables, it effects browser’s reading time. Avoid full page tables for fast rendering. The browser won't show anything until it's read the whole thing that way. For a faster loading webpage, either use multiple tables (not nested) or put some content above the main table to make your content in the first table show up faster. In this way you can provide something to read to your visitors while the rest of your page loads.
I think by reading this article you must have got a nice idea of restructuring your website in a way so that it takes less time to get displayed and in turn it will also increase the traffic to your website, which is truly essential in today’s age.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Smart SEO tips to beat the global recession
In this cost-cutting age companies are finding very tough to release their money, All the businesses are badly effected by recession and companies are trying to follow cost cutting policies. However, instead of cost-cutting, it makes more sense to ensure that our marketing investments earn high returns.
It is in our interest to ride the wave of optimism despite the current global financial meltdown.
SEO offers a platform to businessmen, entrepreneurs as well as individuals to promote their business across the globe; it is the cheapest way to promote your business. We should change our SEO trend in order to beat this downfall.
Searches focused on price-sensitivity, quality and value
In today’s age it is essential that you have a deep understanding of what people have in mind when searching for your products or services (or those of your clients). So you should assume yourself as imaginary searcher and design the keywords. Consumer goods, financial products, utility services and the like will see an upswing in popularity for searches indicating a high degree of price sensitivity. Look to phrases that incorporate these terms, as well as modifiers such as “sale”, “specials”, “buy online” (associated with good value in many areas) and so on. Key phrases like “discount”, “low-cost”, “affordable” can drive quality traffic to your website in this recession period.
Emphasis on measurable results
Unlike the traditional marketing mechanism, which lacks tracking results, online marketing (PPC, email marketing etc.) offers detailed report of every click, so that you can change your strategy and take more profitable decisions.
Long term strategy
SEO is a long term strategy unlike PPC which gives you immediate returns, so if you have started with SEO for your company, by the time other companies will start keeping their feet into the market you will be settled and then certainly it will give you good returns that time.
It is in our interest to ride the wave of optimism despite the current global financial meltdown.
SEO offers a platform to businessmen, entrepreneurs as well as individuals to promote their business across the globe; it is the cheapest way to promote your business. We should change our SEO trend in order to beat this downfall.
Searches focused on price-sensitivity, quality and value
In today’s age it is essential that you have a deep understanding of what people have in mind when searching for your products or services (or those of your clients). So you should assume yourself as imaginary searcher and design the keywords. Consumer goods, financial products, utility services and the like will see an upswing in popularity for searches indicating a high degree of price sensitivity. Look to phrases that incorporate these terms, as well as modifiers such as “sale”, “specials”, “buy online” (associated with good value in many areas) and so on. Key phrases like “discount”, “low-cost”, “affordable” can drive quality traffic to your website in this recession period.
Emphasis on measurable results
Unlike the traditional marketing mechanism, which lacks tracking results, online marketing (PPC, email marketing etc.) offers detailed report of every click, so that you can change your strategy and take more profitable decisions.
Long term strategy
SEO is a long term strategy unlike PPC which gives you immediate returns, so if you have started with SEO for your company, by the time other companies will start keeping their feet into the market you will be settled and then certainly it will give you good returns that time.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting
Linkbating is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website.
Linkbait is basically content created particularly to generate enough interest (like freebies, sensational stories, games etc.) for others to willingly create links back to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you.
Google also gives importance to the links in order to determine the page rank of a website. So your internet business is directly proportional to the quality backlinks of your website
The goal of Linkbaiting is to offer something so unique and mentionable that other sites will link to your site for free.
Several LinkBaiting ideas are:
1. Introduce a simple free tool or free template for people in your subject area to use, and spread it around, for instance a script that checks a site's rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
2. Keep an eye on blogs, give reviews. If your review is well-written and constructive, you will get noticed and surely it will pay you in long run..
3. Write persuasive content : Nothing can bring you more incoming links than compelling content. Write content that people would like to read and recommend to their own visitors. This can be done by writing original research, unique posts, making people think, writing posts that teach new things, writing relevant postings, publish quality links.
4. Humor: Nothing is like writing something which will enlighten someone’s day, so if you have some funny pictures , humorous stories, or anything else that will generate laughter it could be posted on your site or blog. Doesn’t matter whether it relates to your company's business or not. Once people have clicked to your humor page, they will probably stay and look around a bit.
5. Contests and Games: organize some contests or games, this will surely drive traffic to your website.
6. Controversial opinions: A blog entry which has contradictory opinions will really lead to intense debates. It can certainly stir things up as readers alert others to what you have to say and then additionally will visit your website.
7. Sensational stories: If a client was saved because she was using your security system in his house, write an article about it. If your client’s business is increased dramatically after taking your SEO services then publish it.
Of course, there could be a lot more possibilities .The goal is simply to maximize the number of links to your site. Offering a free tool or a free service such as indicated above are a few ways of achieving that goal.
Best of luck in your Linkbaiting!
Linkbait is basically content created particularly to generate enough interest (like freebies, sensational stories, games etc.) for others to willingly create links back to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you.
Google also gives importance to the links in order to determine the page rank of a website. So your internet business is directly proportional to the quality backlinks of your website
The goal of Linkbaiting is to offer something so unique and mentionable that other sites will link to your site for free.
Several LinkBaiting ideas are:
1. Introduce a simple free tool or free template for people in your subject area to use, and spread it around, for instance a script that checks a site's rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
2. Keep an eye on blogs, give reviews. If your review is well-written and constructive, you will get noticed and surely it will pay you in long run..
3. Write persuasive content : Nothing can bring you more incoming links than compelling content. Write content that people would like to read and recommend to their own visitors. This can be done by writing original research, unique posts, making people think, writing posts that teach new things, writing relevant postings, publish quality links.
4. Humor: Nothing is like writing something which will enlighten someone’s day, so if you have some funny pictures , humorous stories, or anything else that will generate laughter it could be posted on your site or blog. Doesn’t matter whether it relates to your company's business or not. Once people have clicked to your humor page, they will probably stay and look around a bit.
5. Contests and Games: organize some contests or games, this will surely drive traffic to your website.
6. Controversial opinions: A blog entry which has contradictory opinions will really lead to intense debates. It can certainly stir things up as readers alert others to what you have to say and then additionally will visit your website.
7. Sensational stories: If a client was saved because she was using your security system in his house, write an article about it. If your client’s business is increased dramatically after taking your SEO services then publish it.
Of course, there could be a lot more possibilities .The goal is simply to maximize the number of links to your site. Offering a free tool or a free service such as indicated above are a few ways of achieving that goal.
Best of luck in your Linkbaiting!
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