Although not a glamorous  optimization technique, site speed overlaps with usability and design and now that it impacts search rankings, it is important to learn how you can increase your site’s performance for humans and search engines alike.

Fortunately, Google has made it as easy as installing a ff plugin which will make recommendations on how to improve your site’s performance. If you  have a large, enterprise-level corporate site running a CMS, the bulk of your work may be in caching the database calls your site’s making in order to render data on page load.

If this is the case, I suggest starting off with a smaller sized micro-site since they can be used for backlinking, which if coupled with nofollow tags, can  help boost rankings across multiple Web properties without modifying each site’s code.  What’s more, since micro-sites are a great way to target longtail terms, by boosting site speed across your micro-sites, you not only improve the way users interact with your site, you may also increase competitive advantage with organic rankings for a larger list of keywords.

If you’ve already measured your site’s performance with Google’s Page Speed, were there any items you think it missed in its recommendations? And has your site increased in rankings since making the changes?

During the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a number of projects all requiring input from individuals whose main job function has nothing to do with Websites or Marketing. In a lot of ways this outsider perspective is valuable to me because oftentimes I walk away with identifying gaps in keyword variations or Web design/usability.

But, as many of you know, well intended discussions with “outsiders” can also turn on you pretty quickly. For example, it seems to start with a phrase like this, “I’ve been seeing more Websites do this…” and what usually follows is completely foreign to anything you’ve ever heard or seen, is a decade old, or worse yet is something that is better served as an example of what not to do.

One thing is for sure, there are many people who are on the Web nowadays and having spent several hours a night surfing it DOESN’T makes you an expert. Just like drinking lots of wine doesn’t you a sommelier.

Don’t get me wrong. Ideas are worth sharing (and wine is worth drinking). However, use a bit of humility and if you’re going to refer to “lots of sites”, have at least one URL of an actual site as an example. Drawing what you think you saw, can end up making things a bit more difficult than necessary.

What does this video have to do with SEO? Here’s a good quote by Mike Grehan at ClickZ

“…by using integrated marketing techniques to create awareness, build your brand, and create end-user demand, you can pull your clients into the search engine charts.”

Zen-like words at the end of this video also apply.

Below is an example of a visitor system  report I built with custom reports tool in Google Analytics:

How this report can help

This report measures the following multiple visitor parameters: uniques, avg. time on site, and bounce rate against some key system info like, browser, browser version, screen res, Flash version, and Java support. Once this report generates, click the percentage button (right-hand side) and view the data in an easy-to-digest pie chart.

It’s a very simple report structure but at the same time it is extremely helpful in determining how design changes like typography or backend development like jQuery and AJAX calls affect your user community.  Take the recent Firefox 3.6 upgrade which supports WOFF, really exciting design stuff is happening – which can also help give your Website a competitive advantage but how many of your visitors (and which visitors) would this design modification impact?

Developers also often run into issues with cross-browser compliance. This becomes a real pain point particularly with form validation. If your site depends on forms as the primary method of passing online leads to offline sales, understanding how different browsers handle your JavaScript validation, etc. is another critical area to master.

Finally, just seeing how your visitors measure up with the Web browser trending data may offer a bit more information about your visitor type, which is of interest for other integrated online marketing campaigns.

I’ve got a ton of custom reports I use but am always looking for more. So, please leave me a comment if you’ve got some that you’re willing to share.

I hate to admit it, but I guess I’m a bit skeptical about pursing follower count as a valid metric for discerning quality and relevancy.  I mean, how important is follower count, anyway?  What does it really mean?

Perhaps, this is more clear if you isolate this one data point. Let’s suppose follower count captures relevancy to some degree.  If you consider relevancy as a marker for good content, then it seems logical to think that the more followers one has, the higher the content is (in terms of relevancy for a particular audience).  So, if that’s true – follower count may not be a good measurement since it doesn’t really indicate how good your content is, especially since there are many different methods – outside of good tweets-  to get followers.

This reminds me a lot of basic search engine algorithms.  Think back to the days when keyword stuffing was all you really needed to gain good rankings. We all know that if search engines used this one metric for ranking today (instead of a combination of  page rank, inbound and outbound links, etc.) search result relevancy would be poor, at best.  In the same way search engines enhanced their algorithms, it seems like combining follower count with another metric would help improve discerning quality and relevancy. This could in turn, help Twitter users find high quality posts.

Tweet count is okay for measuring engagement, but it seems a bit one sided. Engagement as measured with a tool like Twitter Grader – doesn’t really satisfy how good  your tweets are to your community. It’s more about how many tweets you’re responsible for.  As for measuring “power” – that’s basically just follower count.

So, what about RTs? This seems like one such metric that could reveal a lot about tweet and profile quality. The retweet (RT), combined with follower count, could provide a better picture of who on Twitter is actually worth following. RTs allow you to see how many times someone shared your tweet. Therefore, the more RTs you have, it seems logical to think, the higher quality tweets you have, as well. This also seems to better quantify engagement, since users are sharing your content.

This is probably not a novel idea. However, it just seemed important enough for me to mention, since, after all, I’m getting tired of seeing all those DMs on improving follower count.