Tag Archives: google

Google to Penalize Slow Loading Websites

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

Website Speed Counts!Something that has been hinted upon for a couple years, was finally announced – Big G is working a penalty for slow load time into their algorithm.   According to Google’s Webmaster Central blog,  the penalty at this time is a minor one, and only affects:

  • less than 1% of search queries
  • only queries in English made through Google.com

As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.

It goes on to say that the penalty doesn’t count as much as “Relevancy of the page” – but what else does?

You can check your website’s load time at Pingdom.

Some tips to speed up web page load times:

  1. Reduce HTTP requests
    • Combine all javascript files into one
    • Combine all CSS files into one
    • Use CSS Sprites to reduce number of background images needed
  2. Reduce the number of images on a page
  3. Optimize images to reduce their file size
  4. Use  an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
  5. Minify CSS and Javascript
  6. Use HTML and CSS over images where ever possible.

Google Local Search: An In Depth Look

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

Google Local SearchThe introduction of Google’s Local Search into it’s regular results (Universal Search) has been a real game changer as more, and more categories and locations are offered up near the top of organic searches.  We’re going to cover the bases on what to do to improve your business’s rankings in the local search results & a few pot holes to steer away from.  Please note, it’s no substitute or an organic search engine strategy, but can compliment one very well since many of the same content and inbound linking principals still apply.

  1. Your Site’s Contact Page

    • First of all – have a contact page!  Title it “Contact” as is the convention around the web, and name it something like “contact.html” or “contact-my-company.php.”
    • Include a full address including city, state, and zip code within the locale that you’re targeting.
    • Include a local phone number, i.e. – make sure the area code matches the the targeted location’s.
    • Have multiple locations?  If you run a multi-national corporation, why not hire an SEO company to rank your locations because it gets a little tricky and is outside the scope of this post.

  2. Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Your URL

    • Use a hCard in your website’s head section.  Learn here, create here. Simply use it as the markup/HTML for that part of your contact page.
    • City/State in Contact Page Title Tag
    • City/State in Index Page Title Tag
    • Location in URL (Ex. – AthensGAWebDesigners.com)

  3. Your Local Business Profile

    • 1st, go to Google’s Local Business, and claim your business’s profile if you haven’t yet.
    • Profile using local phone number (area code matching the target location)
    • Location in Profile Title
    • Service/Product in Business Category Fields

  4. Customer/Client Reviews

    • Customer Reviews are Important!
    • And it’s not just the reviews on Google Maps itself -
    • Google feeds it’s listings with dozens if not hundreds other third party review sites.  For example: Kudzu.com, Yelp, InsiderPages, and many industry specific review services.

  5. Pitfalls & What not to do

    • Don’t List a 1-800 number on your profile or on your contact page, I know it makes no sense.  Have one, get your web guys to use an image to display it.
    • Negative Reviews – I know they’re hard to stop, but if you can contact the reviewer & ask them to remove it – do it.
    • Don’t use multiple Business Profiles with:
      1. The same business name
      2. The same phone number
      3. The same address (this one is particularly detrimental)

Google Learns Flash

Posted on by Wade Sonenberg

I love Flash, I really do.

But as primarily a SEO firm, we’ve been steering clients away from flash based websites for years due to the fact that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN couldn’t index their content. By content, I mean written text, images, and of course links among other website elements.

Googe Plus Flash

It appears the Game is Changing Once Again

Google announced that it has made vast improvements in crawling and indexing flash based content from menus to entire sites:

“In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.”

- From the Official Google Blog

At present, Google is only able to index textual content in flash designs, but this is a vast improvement. More information on Google’s new functionality can be found at Google’s Webmaster Central.

Great, now I can have a beautiful flash based and rank it well too, right?

Not so fast. Hopefully this dream is not too distant in the future, but at present little is known about how effective conventional SEO strategies mesh with the new update to Google’s algorithm. Besides, without Yahoo! and MSN Live making similar announcements, website owners could be losing out as much as 30-40% of their search traffic.