Tag: Search Engine Optimisation

Speed Up Your Website For an SEO Benefit

Posted by admin – 01/06/2010

There is  a lot of buzz at the moment about the speed of your website being a factor that affects your search engine rankings. Matt Cutts the unofficial  public face of Google seems to be dropping little hints to this fact whenever he speaks, most recently when he addressed the Dublin chamber of commerce you can read more about Matt’s visit in the Irish Times

You know you need to speed up your site but how do you do it

Now that you know the benefits of having a higher page loading speed, how do you actually go about it? Well, most SEO experts will usually proceed by performing the following SEO methodologies considered to be the best in order to achieve higher web page speed:

  • Reduce initial display time of webpage
  • Resize and optimize images
  • Upgrade CSS style sheets to the latest standards
  • Optimize Java scripts
  • Optimize multimedia content

What did you just say?

All this sounds great but if your a small business owner with limited experience with the web its a tall order in anyone’s book.  what you need is a step by step guide on how to do all the above tasks.

  • Reduce initial display time of webpage

Well yes, that’s what were trying to do! ignore this one as it’s the out come of the methods we are going to put in place.

  • Resize and optimize images

One we can work with. Often images on a web page are unoptimised. What this means is they are larger in file size then they need to be (larger the file the longer it takes to download) this can be because the image is using more detail then it needs, or the actual image dimensions are lager then is being displayed

these are both exactly the same image except one has been resized in the page mark-up

speed

speed

You can do optimise and resize your images online with www.webresizer.com

  • Upgrade CSS style sheets to the latest standards

This is a bit misleading as its not upgrading your CSS as such,  it’s just re-writing it into a shorthand version. We use CSS tidy there was a hosted version at http://csstidy.sourceforge.net/ but it’s no longer there, we have our own copy hosted on our servers http://webmojo.co.uk/csstool/

  • Optimize Java scripts

What this simply means is place all your Java scripts into one external file

  • Optimizing Multimedia Content

Audio: First ask yourself whether your site really needs sounds or music! Having a midi file playing in the background is an annoyance (my opinion); visitors come to your page because of its contents and not to listen to music. However, if it’s imperative to include background sounds or music try to use a midi file or a small .wav file that loops seamlessly.

Video: Since video files can be quite large, it’s best to provide a link to the file mentioning the file size and leave the choice of viewing it to the visitor rather than forcing it to load in the page.

Flash: Flash is a vector based program. To keep Flash files at a minimal size try to use fewer fonts, reuse symbols, compress the included sounds, convert bitmaps to vector graphics etc. To judiciously decide whether Flash intros are required for your site.

http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/design/optimizing_web_pages.php3

SEO Search Engine Optimisation Yorkshire Guide

Posted by admin – 01/10/2008

If you take a look at lot of web design companies, you will undoubtedly see a section saying SEO or Search engine optimisation it seems like this art has found its way into the main stream web design community. However, without a little knowledge, you could be throwing money away on an ineffective service, a lot of web design companies will tell you that they can optimise your site, but getting to the top of the search engines with the phrase that pays is not a five-minute job

SEO It is time consuming

A SEO campaign is time consuming and very intense, a fine balance of words and weights. With no closer way of turning the written language into pure math, but with the exception that part of the equation is hidden from you and changing on a regular basis. This is where true skill is demonstrated from the search engine optimiser to bring your site from zero to hero.

Control your SEO expectations

In my opinion, planning a successful website should begin as early as possible, months if not in some cases years ahead. A new site will find it very difficult to rank for competitive terms until, like a fine wine it has matured. In the early days of a website going live try to aim for search terms that, as I call it; are low hanging fruit. For example, the term “web design” is highly competitive and the chances of a young site ranking anywhere near the top 10 for this is quite small. However, if you add some level of localisation to the mix like “web design Yorkshire” this “keyword phrase” would be easier to rank in the top position but still quite a lot of competition from other web sites. We can take this even further by adding a less common qualifier, “Web design Doncaster” Doncaster is a smaller graphical area then Yorkshire so it should be less competitive for this term. You would need to, or get your search engine optimisation company to research this more in depth.

Do your keyword research

Keyword research is so important, as targeting the wrong words or phrases can mean a great expensive site getting next to no quality traffic from the web. Not all traffic is created equal. If you sell nothing but “green umbrellas”, but you are targeting the keyword umbrellas, sure, you may get a lot of traffic but most of it won’t convert to a sale because some want a white umbrella some want a yellow.

Calculating the Return on investment

The return on investment need’s to be considered before you undertake any sort of outsourced search engine optimisation. It is always a good idea to get your SEO company to perform a feasibility study before you undertake spending out on the full project. A search engine optimisation feasibility study involves finding out the amount of searches taking place per month for a selection of key words or phrases related to your product or service. Then you will need to discover how many sites are competing for the same terms. Factor in the amount of profit you would get from selling your product or service. There will be some form of estimation on the figures from this you will get a better idea of the amount of work needed to get to the top of the search engines such as Google and Yahoo and whether getting to the top ten will turn a profit or not. Its better to spend a little then to waste a lot

I hope this short guide has been helpful to preparing to take on a SEO company with some of the things you need to know as a client