We all know that site speed has a correlation with your search rankings, and more importantly we know that it definitely has a direct effect on user satisfaction. With that in mind, there is no excuse for not doing the work needed to make your site more responsive.

The first thing you need to do before tweaking things to increase your site speed is to first find the loading time of your pages. You can do this easily using Google Analytics and checking the average page load time. Of course you’ll need to insert Google Analytic’s snippet for tracking page load time in order to get the required data. Finding out which of your pages are lagging in terms of page load times will help you use your time more wisely since you know which ones have issues that need addressing at once.

Once you find out which pages have problematic loading times, you can use Google’s Page Speed Tools to find out exactly what you can do to optimize your page. You can either use the Page Speed tool as a browser extension, or use the Page Speed Online tool, which is a web-based tool.  You will be given a Page Speed Score (perfect score of 100), which indicates not the loading time of the page, but how much room for improvement there is in terms of following best practices related to page speed. The good thing about these tools is that they will point out which of the best practices the page you’re having analysed have yet to follow so as to reduce page load time. Suggestions for improvement are categorized according to priority so that you will know which issue to tackle first. Clicking on each suggestion will give you a brief explanation of how following that suggestion will improve your site speed, and will also give a detailed list of all pages affected by the oversight. Best practices pointed out range from serving scaled images to preferring asynchronous resources.

Once you do know what needs to be done in order to improve your site’s speed, all you need to do is just carry out the suggestions where possible. If you are just getting started with search engine optimization and do not understand most of the suggestions, don’t get daunted by the jargon. A little research will help you a lot since a lot of the suggestions are actually quite easy to implement. However, for suggestions that are really quite too technical for you, then just go ahead and enlist the help of a developer.

Another way you can make life a bit easier for you is to sign up for Google’s Page Speed Service. Unfortunately, signing up won’t guarantee that you will indeed be able to enjoy the service since it is still in a period of limited availability, but if you do get approved for this service you can rest knowing that Google’s doing all the hard work for you to ensure fast loading times.

Good luck!

Vic Carrara
MasterWebSoftware.com

Knowledge isn’t power. The use of knowledge is power. And this piece of SEO know-how has definitely got some potential to it.

Every wondered what exactly Google’s search guidelines were? Wonder no more. A copy of the latest 125 page guidelines from May 2011 have been discovered on Google Docs.

While much of the information is already known and is part of solid SEO practice, there are many useful sections showing that Google is very wise to many black hat SEO techniques.

I’m not going to summarise the whole lot here, so here is the link: Google Search Guidleines.

Happy reading!

Vic Carrara
MasterWebSoftware.com

The need to optimise mobile sites is becoming essential for businesses that want to cash in on the benefits of interenet marketing since mobile devices are gaining such popularity.

Even more important than the popularity of these devices, is the way that device owners use their mobile devices, because the use of online services in mobile devices is also becoming more common.

According to Yahoo’s Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategy, Paul Cushman, and Microsoft Mobile Advertising’s Director of Global Trade Marketing, Jamie Wells, “small- and medium-size businesses are taking to mobile advertising — even more so than they did the wired Web” primarily because they “are finding quantifiable value with mobile advertising, especially those that concentrate on optimizing their keywords.”

With so many businesses taking to mobile advertising, it is wise to follow their leads and concentrate on your presence in the mobile web. If you have websites that still do not have mobile versions, now is definitely the time to develop and launch one.

If you do decide to pour in your resources to tapping into the mobile market though, it would be wise to know just what you are getting into. A good guide to help you develop your mobile online strategy is Yahoo’s study on “Mobile Modes”, which was published only this August. The study reveals a lot about how mobile users use the Internet on their mobile devices, from the percentage of time devoted to a specific activity to the hours during which ad recall is at its peak.

To help get you started, here’s some of the advice given by Yahoo! given what they learned:

1. Be part of the growth – The mobile web is growing exponentially so there is much opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. They also revealed that mobile users are still unsatisfied with their current mobile sites, which means you still have a chance to wow them and connect with a well-developed mobile site.
2. Pick high traffic content -
   News, sports, and entertainment are the most in demand type of content among mobile users. So while your business might not be entirely related to these fields, find a way to insert these content to your site to attract more mobile users.
3. Ad recall is strongest in the morning – That said, find ways to optimize your site to target morning mobile users.
4. Optimize mobile Ads by mode – Do read more about the different mobile modes to understand how to leverage your site better. Remember that the modes reflect what the mobile users actually do on their mobile devices, so taking mobile modes into account when developing your mobile marketing strategy will help you get higher conversion rates.

And last but not least (even if Yahoo! did not mention this), make sure you test your mobile site and continuously monitor its performance. Since the mobile industry, including the mobile web, evolves really fast, you should adapt to changes quickly, or even better, strive to be one of the innovators.

Vic Carrara
MasterWebSoftware.com