Technorati Tags: facebook, vanity url

There are many things that cause slow load times. Many people think all they have to do to lower load times is get rid of images or make them smaller. There is a lot more you can do. The number of items that your page loads adds to slow load times. If your webpage has 30 images 2 CSS files, 4 javascript files that is 36 things that have to load. Each time a new item is loaded that ads to a longer load time. Consider using CSS Sprites and combing images or code that don’t need to be in several files. Also you don’t need to load all js and css for every page give specific css and js files to each section that needs them. At the very least pick your top five busiest pages and set them up so they load only what they need and nothing else. Another thing that can slow down load time are nested tables. I have seen webpages with 120 nested tables before. A table will not display until all of the HTML for it has loaded.

The problem is that many websites are built on top of some CMS or shopping cart. It may be impossible for some people to make these changes. The advice I give is that if your website is doing well and making you money it is worth the investment to redo the site so that it loads faster. If your just starting out or already invested a lot into a website it may not be worth the extra expense. Slow load times will not kill your site I’m just talking about how to make your site better. If your running a business you should always be looking for little ways to squeeze out more profit. I mentioned in a previous post on this subject that Google Maps reduced their page size by 30% and traffic went up 30%. I have also read that you have anywhere from 3 to 5 seconds to convince people to not to hit the back button. If your convince content does not load very fast you will lose sales.

Technorati Tags: webpage load time, page size, google

Online Reputation – Twitter search allows you to monitor good and bad things said about you. You should have a Twitter search rss feed set up for your company name and products as well as employee names. This gives you extra time to take advantage of that information. If it is bad information you can start tweeting a response. I would use a separate account to communicate with people that said bad things. Don’t point out bad things on your company account. If the information is a link to something bad you can start working on content to make sure the bad information does not show up first page in other search engines. It is important to know what the top ten results for your brands are and make sure it is all positive. Make sure it is hard for some negative blog post to pop out of nowhere and rank number 3 for your brand. If it is good information use your main account to re-tweet this person and follow them. It is always good to encourage your fans.

Promotion – The obvious way to promote your company and products is to make useful tweets to your followers and by sending tweets @ people. The other way is to take advantage of the real time twitter search. Make some tweets that are not toward your followers. Promote your service and use keywords that people might be searching for. If you are doing SEO and/or PPC you should have a wealth of information on what keywords are being searched for and convert. Don’t do this too often since it might alienate your followers. It is important to keep your followers. You can also use your analytics to find out what time of day is best for certain terms. Also you can work in your terms into your tweets to your followers. Twitter search works like Google in that the words do not have to be together. Lets say you want to show up for the search “buy blue widgets” all you have to do is make sure those 3 words are in your tweet anywhere and in any order and you will show up for that search.

Technorati Tags: twitter, twitter search, google, online reputation, reputation mangement

“from:elliot filename:pdf” shows all messages from Elliot that have a pdf attachment

“from:eliot has:attachment” shows all messages from Elliot that have any attachment

“from:eliot in:anywhere” Shows all messages from Elliot that are in any folder trash, spam, sent…

I really like the in: feature normally I have to switch to that mailbox then do a search this way I can do all my searches from my inbox. (in:trash, in:spam)

Is:unread This shows me all my unread email

after:2004/04/16 before:2004/04/18 Messages sent between April 16, 2004 and April 18, 2004.*

If you start using labels more and/or you use Gmail to check several email address like I do the label operator is invaluable.

Technorati Tags: google, gmail, gmail operators

Yahoo and Google both have something called Quality Score. Yahoo gives a quality score to an ad group while Google gives quality score to an individual term as it is typed into Google in real time. When you set up your account you start off the same in Google and Yahoo. It is important to organize your keywords so that they are grouped by subject. Sometimes there will be keywords that seem to fit in 2 groups. You will just have to choose. There is no perfect way to do this but there are some rules to go by. The less keywords you have in each ad group the better. This does not mean one or two keywords per ad group or even less than 5. There are some ad groups that might just have 2 or 3 but for the most part you will have more.

The important thing is that when you write your ad you have the keywords that are in your ad group in it. This does not mean that every single keyword has to be in the ad it just needs to be close. It should be obvious if you see a group of words in an ad group if they need their own ad group.

In Yahoo you still have more work to do. You need to now split up your groups so that the higher CTR keywords are together. Put your head terms in a group and then split up your long tail keywords into 2 more groups. Put your low volume keywords in their own group and the rest in a middle volume group. Over time you will get more information and you will be moving some keywords around. You can keep the ad groups with the same name and just add –LV, -HV, -MV tacked onto the end.

When you set up your account only use standard match on most terms. When you do this you will not have the ability to use negative match. Yahoo just does not give you the control you have over at Google. If you just really want to use advanced match be careful and set up negative matches and watch your log files.

If you use Google Analytics you will need to set up Keyword URL tagging in yahoo so you can split your PPC data from your SEO data. The guys over at PPC Hero have a great write up on this.

There is a lot more to Yahoo and I will talk about that in another post.

Technorati Tags: yahoo, ppc, yahoo ppc, yahoo search marketing, adwords, overture, Google, Google Adwords

There is no benefit to switching to keyword rich url’s. As a matter of fact 100% of the time there will be a negative effect in the short run.

I’m not going to get into the technical side of how to create a 404 page there are lots of blog posts and articles already out there. I’m going to talk about your strategy. What is your goal? Do you want to entertain, solve the problem, or act like nothing happened?

Here is a list of strategies that people use and the pros and cons of each.

1. Redirect all 404 traffic to the front page. This only slightly better than doing nothing. This confuses some people. They clicked on a specific link and they end up at your front page that may have nothing to do with what they clicked on.
2. Create a template page of your website and put a page not found message on that. With this method at least now they know that something went wrong but still does not help the person. They still can’t find what they are looking for.
3. Create a custom 404 page with some logic that tries to guess what the person is looking for. I would also put a search box on this page as well. If part of the URL is correct like the folder you can have a specific 404 landing page with a list of things they might be looking for. Try to help the visitor find what they need.
4. Create some gimmick like a funny video, cartoon, or game. This can get you some attention and might get you some viral attention. Here are some examples.

Another benefit to using a custom 404 page is that you can put your analytics code on it. If you don’t have a custom 404 page it will not show up in Google Analytics. You need to modify the tracking code on your 404 page so don’t just use the normal footer. Here is a link to how to modify that code. It is very important to monitor your 404 errors. You can find where people have linked to you incorrectly. You can send them a message to fix it or 301 redirect it to the correct page.

I have put a lot of thought in what is in the future for Google. They are so big that there is serious talk of making them a monopoly. I foresee in the future that there will be a point when bandwidth will be unlimited or near unlimited. It may not be in the next 10 years but it could be in 20-30. I have read that scientists have successfully teleported data. At some point bandwidth won’t be an issue. This means that we become a completely wireless world. Cable companies, phone companies, cell phone companies will lose their monopoly.

Google is working toward managing all data that exists. When all data is on the Internet they will be entrenched as the company that knows how to find everything. In the future you will be able to set up an Adwords account and be able to advertise anywhere you want. They already have ads for TV. Not many people use it but when all TV is on the Internet Google will have worked out the bugs and have the advertiser base to handle it.

Google does a lot of A/B testing. They asked users if more results per page would be better and they said yes. Google went and did some testing to see if this was true. They found out that traffic went down by 20%. It was not because people were finding what they wanted it was because of load time. Remember here we are talking Google who return results in 0.16 seconds. She said returning 30 results only doubled the time so worst case it was still less than one second load time. She did not say when this test was done so it could have been when there were more people on dial up. Even if it was Google still loads very fast on dial up even 5 years ago. She then talked about Google Maps and how when it launched it was 120k in size. They reduced the size by 30% and they got 30% more maps requests. People want content fast.

Just about every site I have had to do an SEO evaluation for is over 500k and I have seen several that were 1mb. People need to understand that websites are not a TV commercial or a magazine spread. On TV and magazines you get the information instantly. You do the same thing on a website and people will be just sitting there for a bit. If a site takes longer than a few seconds to load people will hit the back button.

I have seen websites with 100k just in text from javscript, css, and html. Then there are the images. This is where things get out of hand. I had one client that had put huge .bmp files on the front page. This is an extreme and I have only seen once. The point is scale down your images and remove some altogether. Only use css that you are going to use on that page. Don’t load the css code for every page on your site for every page load.

People also need to calm down on the javascript. Very few people know how to code javascript very well so most webpages just have a script they downloaded and they have no idea what it does. Also stay away from the rapid deployment asp.net stuff. A hello world page can be 100k or more. That stuff is designed for intranet web apps. It should never be used on an active public website.

If you really care about people spending time on your website make it fast. People want information and accomplish goals they don’t want a bunch of pretty pictures and fancy navigation. Your goal is not to impress your boss or friends it is to keep people on your website. The biggest mistake that people make is they show their website already loaded to a friend or boss and ask them what they think. That is an invalid test. First off the person is only looking at it like they do a TV commercial or magazine. That is not how they will look at it if they found the site by themselves. There is a big difference. Most people are in a big hurry very few people spend a ton of time on the Internet. Granted there is always an audience that does want all the bells and whistles and is willing to wait for the load time but they are in the minority.