Blog SEO Expert

Review of WordPress Plugin – SEO Ultimate

Blog SEO Expert — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:12:04 +0000

SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin Review

If you have been blogging and using WordPress for even a few weeks, you would have heard of the All In One SEO plugin used to optimize blog posts. It is a great plugin, and is very widely used. However, it is also quite old.

Shouldn’t you be looking for fresh alternatives if you have just been blindly using some of the older WordPress SEO plugins like All In Once SEO or HeadSpace?

(Image by Danard Vincente)

Well, now you have a reason to – there is a new SEO plugin available that can be used for search engine optimization of your blog posts, and a lot more!

SEO Ultimate – The ultimate plugin for SEO that does a lot more

Yes, that’s true. The SEO Ultimate plugin obviously does a lot when it comes to SEO (including everything that the All In One SEO plugin does). But it goes further and does a lot many other useful things as well.

SEO Ultimate – List of Modules

SEO Ultimate WordPress Plugin - List of Modules and Functionality

404 Monitor
Canonicalizer
Code inserter
Competition researcher
Deeplink jaggernaut
File editor
Internal relevance researcher
Link mask generator
Linkbox inserter
Meta description editor
Meta keywords editor
Meta robot tags editor
More link customizer
Nofollow manager
Permalink tweaker
Rich snippet creator
Sharing facilitator
Slug optimizer
Title tag rewriter
Webmaster verification assistant
Whitepapers

Now that’s a long list, eh? The best part is – you can enable or disable each functionality individually! So you have full control over what you are entrusting the plugin with!

Now let’s dive in and look at the functionality of each of these modules.

Core Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Modules

Title Tag Rewriter

You can customize and format the title of any post, page or homepage using this module. It also puts your title at the beginning of the title tag, which is good for SEO.

Meta Description Editor

You can edit the meta description tag of any post, page or the homepage. This is what’s usually shown in the search engine results below your link, so tweaking this gives you an opportunity to influence the searchers and increase the click through rate.

Meta Keywords Editor

You can edit the meta keywords tag of any post, page or the homepage. There is also a facility to generate meta keywords using the category, tags, frequently used words in the post, etc.

You can also specify global keywords that apply to all webpages of your blog. You can also edit or update keywords for multiple posts using the mass editor.

Meta Robot Tags Editor

You can easily add no-index attribute ( ) to archives, login page, search results page etc. This is very useful in order to avoid duplicate content penalties, especially if you have set your theme to show full blog posts in the archives pages.

You can also set the meta robot tags for individual posts, pages, categories, tags, etc.

Deeplink Jaggernaut

This is an excellent tool to interlink your blog posts based on keywords.

You specify the keywords you want to target and the destination URL of the blog post you want to rank higher in search engine listings, and SEO Ultimate searches your blog’s content to create links to that post with your keyword as the anchor text.

The best part is that within WordPress, these auto generated links point to the actual post or page and not the URL. Therefore, even if you change the URL or slug of a post or page, the link would remain valid.

You can also specify the maximum number of links generated for a keyword and the maximum number of links generated on a post / page.

You can also exclude specific posts and pages from this autolinking functionality – no autolinks would be generated on these posts or pages. You can also force the module to link only to other posts in the sae category!

One cool feature of this module is that you can create links to draft posts as well. These links would not be active when the post is in draft state – they would get auto-enabled as soon as the post is published!

Slug Optimizer

This module removes small, filler words (like of, the, or, and, with, etc.) from a post or page’s URL. This way, your keywords get more weightage in the URL.

You have full control over the words that are removed from the URL.

Permalink Tweaker

This module helps you remove the category base and tag base which is the default for WordPress. As a result, the permalinks for your categories and tags would look like http://www.abc.com/category or http://www.abc.com/tag instead of http://www.abc.com/category/caegory or http://www.abc.com/tag/tag.

Keyword Research and Analysis Modules

Competition Researcher

This module gives you access to search engine data and tools using which you can analyze multiple keywords or URLs. You can:

Check the number of webpages competing for a keyword
Analyze keyword relevance in their titles, anchor text, URLs or body content
Check the number of webpages present in Google’s index from a competitor’s blog / website
Analyze a blog’s incoming & outgoing link profile

Internal Relevance Researcher

Using this module, you can find out which of your posts and pages that rank well in Google for your keywords. You can use this data to optimize your link building efforts.

Other Modules

404 Monitor

Using this module, you can see which of your URLs are giving 404 errors. Then, you can wither update the URLs or use a redirection plugin to point visitors / search engines to the correct URL.

Linkbox Inserter

This module of SEO Ultimate inserts a textbox at the bottom of your posts and pages that contains auto-generated link HTML. Your readers can use this to link to your post / page.

File Editor

This module lets you edit the .htaccess and robots.txt files from within WordPress.

Code Inserter

This module of SEO Ultimate helps you insert customer HTML or JavaScript code into the head, body, header or footer sections of your blog. You can use it to add Google Analytics script or any other scripts.

The advantage of using this module is that you no more need to use your theme to add the code – so even if you change the theme, you don’t have to worry about these codes!

Rich Snippet Creator

You can add snippet code to your posts using this module and make them more appealing to your readers.

Sharing Facilitator

This module of SEO Ultimate provides social bookmarking functionality to your readers. You can choose either an “Add This” or a “Share This” button so that your visitors can share your content on social networking sites.

Webmaster Verification Assistant

This module helps you put the Googl Webmaster Tools verification code in your blog.

Link Mask Generator

This module of the SEO Ultimate plugin creates masks for the external links on your blog, so that the external URLs look like http://www.abc.com/recommmends/seo_ultimate instead of http://www.seoultimate.com/benefits/listing.html.

This is definitely great for affiliate marketers who want to hide their tracking links, but is also good for regular bloggers since it makes the links pretty.

You have full control over which links are masked, and you can also change the base directory to anything like go, suggests, etc. (Example: http://www.abc.com/go/seo_ultimate or http://www.abc.com/suggests/seo_ultimate)

Other Features

Here are the other noteworthy features of the SEO Ultimate plugin.

Import from All In One SEO plugin

If you are already using the All In One SEO plugin, you can import the post meta data (title, description and keywords) from it. This way, you can avoid a lot of manual work if you want to switch to the SEO Ultimate plugin. You can also retain the data in the All In One SEO plugin so that you can go back to it if you don’t like the SEO Ultimate plugin (which is quite unlikely!).

Extensive help

The plugin provides extensive help which is context sensitive – you can find help on the relevant pages within the admin of your blog through WordPress’ help menu itself.

Notices

The plugin provides notices if any of your settings are blocking search engine spiders. It also displays notices if there is a conflicting plugin (like the All In One SEO plugin) active.

Uninstalling the SEO Ultimate plugin

SEO Ultimate plugin includes an uninstaller which can gracefully remove the plugin from your blog without leaving any data behind.

How to get the SEO Ultimate plugin

Now that you know the features of the SEO Ultimate plugin, I am sure you want to take it to a test drive!

SEO Ultimate is a completely free plugin approved by WordPress.org. You can download it from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-ultimate/

What are you waiting for? Go get the SEO Ultimate WordPress plugin now!

Readers who found this post were searching for:

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SEMRush Review – Free SEO / SEM tool to analyze your keywords (and your competition!)

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:59:40 +0000

SEMRush - SEO Keyword Research & Analysis Tool

Ever wanted to know what your keywords are, and the other websites / blogs competing for them? Want to know your competitor’s main keywords? Want to know the main Google AdWords keywords for a blog? Want to know the search engine and AdWords traffic to a site?

SEMRush is the tool for you – its free, and it does all of the above! Here are all the things you can do with SEMRush in detail.

What keywords your competitors use

When you pout a domain name in the search box and hit search, you would get the keywords for which the domain gets traffic from Google, their positions, number of queries per month and more.

The results can be sorted by keyword’s position, percentage of traffic and estimated cost of targeted visitors coming to this site from Google search results. You can also export this data and analyze it offline.

To know what keywords that blog or website buys in Google AdWords, just go to the report “AdWords Keywords” where you will be able to view all the keywords from that site’s AdWords Campaign. You can sort and export this data as well.

[sniplet SEMRush_Banner]

Collect list of best keywords to optimize for your site

When you generate the report for your domain (as explained above), go to the “Google Organic Keywords” report and export it to a file. Open this file in Excel (or another spreadsheet program), and sort it by position in reverse order. You will get the list of keywords for which your blog already has enough high positions in Google SERP.

You can take this list and further optimize your blog posts for these keywords, drawing even more search engine traffic. It’s the easiest way to collect long-tail keywords for your blog.

Obtain related keywords

This can be used to get appropriate keywords for your blog. This is most useful when you are doing the initial keyword research for your blog, but can also be used while researching individual blog posts.

Begin with the main keyword, and generate the report for it. You can know how much a click costs for this keyword in AdWords, the average number of searches for it, and the competition of advertisers in AdWords for that term. The trends column shows changes in volume of searches for this keyword.

If you want to get more phrases that include your main keyword, go to the “Full Search” report. You can also export those results and sort & analyze them in Excel. You get details like the average number of queries per month, CPC and the number of search results in Google SERP. This is how you can find all queries with your min keyword in them.

For getting related keywords, open the “Related keywords” report where you can get queries similar to your main keyword. You can export this report as well.

Obtain common keywords for your domain and your competitors’

When you get the main report for your domain, go to “Competitors in Google” or “Competitors in AdWords” reports to get the list of your competitors in Google SERP or Google AdWords respectively. Then click on the numbers in “Common keywords” column and look at the reports “Competing organic keywords” or “Competing AdWords keywords”. Here, you would get the keywords that are being used by both you and your competitor’s sites!

Use SEMRush now – its FREE!

As you see, there are a lots of tools available at SEMRush. You can also be creative and use the data for innovative purposes!

So start using the SEMRush tool now!

Readers who found this post were searching for:

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Review of WordPress Plugin – SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2

Blog SEO Expert — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 05:18:34 +0000

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 - WordPress Plugin

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), interlinking of posts within your blog plays a big role in onsite SEO. Of course, it can be done manually while writing a blog post. But what if it can be automated? Wouldn’t it be great?

And what if the anchor text of such links contains the exact keywords people are using to look for that post? That would be simply awesome!

The “SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2″ plugin for WordPress does exactly that – automatically! And did I mention that it is free?

What does SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 do?

The plugin primarily collects the data about the search terms used by people to arrive at your blog posts. And it has many ways of utilizing this data:

You can display the most popular search terms as a widget
You can display the most recently used search terms as a widget
You can display the random search terms as a widget
At the bottom of a post, you can display a list the search terms used to arrive at the post
The plugin identifies posts not getting any search engine traffic, and you can configure the plugin to automatically republish such posts
You can choose to convert popular keywords into the post’s tags

Benefits of using the SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 WordPress plugin

So, what exactly are the benefits that you get from using this plugin? The primary advantage of using this plugin is more organic search engine visitors! But here are the details:

Links from widgets

Your posts receive a link from the widgets we talked about above. And since the widgets are normally site-wide, your post gets linked to from all the pages of your site. That’s a lot of link juice!

And let’s not forget the fact that the anchor text of the links is the keywords that people are already using to go to the post. In effect, you are strengthening the post’s ranking for that keyword – automatically.

Increased keyword density

When you choose to display search terms at the bottom of the post, the keyword density increases. Again, you are strengthening the post’s ranking for that keyword – without any actual effort.

Increased search engine traffic to neglected posts

When the plugin republishes a post not getting any search engine traffic, its like publishing a new post altogether. The republished posts have a higher chance of getting indexed and therefore getting new search engine visitors.

Keyword analysis / Keyword research

The plugin also helps with keyword research and analysis. In the admin screen for the plugin, you can see all the keywords that have been used to come to your blog posts and the number of time each has been used.

This means that by looking at this data, you can immediately figure out what search terms people are using to arrive at your blog. Once you know what is popular, you can write more blog posts around these topics and keywords, this increasing the search engine traffic to your blog!

How to get SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2

The plugin can be downloaded for free from the WordPress plugin directory at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/searchterms-tagging-2/

Readers who found this post were searching for:

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Press Release – A great way to generate backlinks to your blog

Blog SEO Expert — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 05:46:56 +0000

Backlinks using a press release

In “Backlinks – The fastest way to good SEO“, we saw how important backlinks are for SEO. We also know that backlinks can be generated by:

(Image by María Cabello)

Let’s see another great source of getting backlinks for your blog – press releases.

What is a Press Release?

A press release is a means of informing publications – newspapers, magazines and even online publications & websites – about some newsworthy development.For SEO purposes, we are interested in getting our press release published on a press release service’s website.

So if there is something happening on your blog in which other people would be interested, you can send out a press release to various publications. For example, if you are running a content on your blog, you can issue a press release. Or you can do it if you start a discussion forum on your blog.

Structure of a Press Release

A press release has several sections:

Title

This is the title of the press release – this is the first thing people would see, so choose this wisely. It should be catchy so that people would be prompted to click on it, and it should still convey what the press release is about. Just like the title of a post!

Summary

This is a short summary of the contents of your press release. Some people just put the first paragraph of their press release as the summary, but its best if you spend a couple of minutes writing it separately.

Body

This contains the actual press release contents. Most press release and distribution services allow links in this section (some for free, and some for a fee) – so this is the section that would give you the link juice!

Tags / Keywords

These are the keywords relevant to the topic of your press release – just like tags for a blog post.

Your Information

This section contains information about you – your name, email, URL, etc.

Some Press Release Distribution Service Websites

Here are some press release distribution services where you can submit your press release. Some are free, and some are paid:

Do you know of a good PR distribution service? Please let us know through your comment!

Readers who found this post were searching for:

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What factors to check in your site’s traffic analysis package for better SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 10:02:01 +0000

Too many factors – Prioritize

A site traffic analysis package like Google Analytics provides lots of matrices to you. If you check each of them daily, you would not be able to do anything else!

The way out is to prioritize and look at the most important factors every day. The others can be observed once a week or once in two weeks.

So, what are the factors that you should be monitoring daily to check your SEO effectiveness? Here we go.

Keywords used by people to find your site on search engines

This is the most important factor, and I am sure this is something that most of you would be already monitoring!

This list shows you which terms people are using in search engines to find your blog or website.

(Image source)

Here is what you can do through this list:

Once you know what terms are popularly being used to arrive at your blog, you can fine-tune your posts or pages for them for a further increase in traffic
When you see a high bounce rate for some terms and phrases, you can check your posts and rewrite them such that they cater better to topics related to those terms
You get ideas for writing new posts from the search phrases people use – what can be better than writing a post that answers a reader’s direct query?

Top landing pages

This is a list of pages that people have used to enter your blog or website. That is, this is a list of pages that people first arrived at on your blog. It can be through a search engine result page (SERP), or through a link from some other blog or website.

Why is this list important?

You can fine-tune these posts or pages (for the search terms used by your visitors) for a further increase in traffic (Check out “Keyword placement – where to put the keywords in a post” for more)
Once you know some posts are good entry points to your blog, you can provide links to other relevant content from these posts and pages

Referring sites

Apart from the traffic from search engines, people would also be coming to your blog through external links. This is a list of such blogs and websites that have been referring people to your blog.

This list will show you the effectiveness of your link building efforts.

If you have been commenting on other blogs and website for getting traffic and backlinks, you can also judge how effective it has been.

Sources of traffic to your site – breakup

This is a breakup of your traffic as per the source – it generally divides you traffic as:

Referred by search engines
Referred by other blogs and websites
Direct traffic (people who typed in your blog URL in the browser address bar)

This shows you mow much traffic you are getting from different sources.

If search engine traffic shows an increase over a few days and weeks, it means that your SEO efforts have been effective.

If referral traffic (visitors referred to you blog by other blogs and websites) shows an increase over a few days and weeks, it means that your efforts for getting backlinks have been successful.

Average time on site

This factor indicates the average time spent by a visitor on your blog or website per visit. The higher this number, the more interesting (or sticky) is your blog for readers.

When people spend more time on your site, it implies that they are getting a good experience on your site – both in terms of content and usability.

Both these are extremely important in the eyes of search engines like Google. We have discussed this earlier – please check out:

Review of Google Analytics – A great tool to measure effectiveness of your SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:35:19 +0000

What is the aim of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

“Why SEO” – this is a very basic question that gets asked very often.

The answer is simple: We do search engine optimization to get more unpaid search traffic from various search engines like Google (also known as organic traffic).

In short, better SEO = More traffic from search engines.

Measuring what we want to improve

Since we set out to improve visitor traffic by doing SEO, the first thing that we need to do is to measure the traffic to your blog.

Unless you can measure the traffic, how can you know how effective is your SEO effort?

So, the very first step for you is to find a good traffic analysis tool if you don’t already have one. That way, you would know any change in traffic that happens due to your SEO.

You would also be able to analyze the changes in traffic patterns, and would be able to pinpoint what SEO steps are more effective for your blog or website.

(Wondering what you should look at in Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your SEO? Please read “What factors to check in your site’s traffic analysis package for better SEO”)

Google Analytics – The best

If you haven’t chosen a traffic analysis / visitor statistic analysis tool, here is what I always recommend: Google Analytics. In fact, you can opt for it even if you are already using some other website traffic analysis tool.

It is a great, absolutely free tool from the Google stable. Anyone, from any country, can register for Google Analytics.

If you have an existing Google account, you can easily register using that as well.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a JavaScript based traffic analysis tool.

When you register your blog or website for Google Analytics, you are given a small JavaScript code snippet that you need to put on all the web pages of your blog or website.

The ideal way to do this is to include the code in the template of the website, so that it automatically gets inserted into all the web pages!

What can be measured?

Google Analytics is a tool that would never stop to amaze you – it is capable of measuring LOTS of things about site traffic.

Here are just a few important matrices that Google Analytics would provide:

Number of page views
Number of visits
Number of unique visitors
Number of pages per visit
Bounce rate
Average time on site
Percentage of new visits
Referring sites
Analysis of sources of traffic to your site
Top landing pages
Top content of your blog or website
Keywords used by people to find your site on search engines

(Don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the terms – we would be discussing them here in the coming weeks)

You can view most of this data for any period you choose – from just one day to a few years! And you can specify exact date ranges for which you want to check the data.

Remember – this is just a fraction of the features available from Google Analytics. You have to try it to get the feel of the power of this tool!

How does Google Analytics look?

Here’s a screenshot of Google Analytics:

Sign up for Google Analytics now!

Signing up for Google Analytics is easy (and free) – don’t delay it!

Here’s the link: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Generate links to your blog through WordPress and Blogspot

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:32:54 +0000

Importance of inbound links

Links pointing to your blog or website are extremely important for SEO. (Check out “Backlinks – The fastest way to good SEO” for more)

They help you get indexed faster by Google and other search engines by providing a pathway to your blog
They make you an authority site in the eyes of search engines
The backlinks drive traffic to your blog

Links To Blog

How to get the backlinks?

For best SEO, backlinks should be obtained from varied sources, and the sources of the backlinks should preferably be websites and blogs having a similar topic.

(Check out “Where to get backlinks from for good SEO” for more details on this)

(Image source)

But getting backlinks might be a little difficult when you are just establishing your blog. Once you get famous by providing good content, backlinks would pour in from other blogs.

But in the beginning, you can start by giving it a little push yourself.

Start your link building

When you want to get your blog indexed by Google, or just want those initial few backlinks, why wait for others to provide them?

You can start by starting an announcement blog at free blogging sites like WordPress.org and Blogspot.com! And what should you do with these blogs?

1. Link to your actual blog or website

On each of these blogs, you can have a post announcing your actual blog – and this announcement post should contain links to your blog with keyword rich anchor text.

These posts can be in the form of a press release informing people about your blog.

2. Link form the Blogroll

These new blogs would have their own blogrolls in the sidebar. Put your actual blog in these blogrolls – again, with keywords.

(For example, BlogSEOExpert.com would be in the blogroll as “BlogSEOExpert.com – SEO for Blogs” or “SEO for Blogs” instead of just “BlogSEOExpert.com”)

3. Category and Tags

On the WordPress.org and BlogSpot.com announcement blogs, you would need to provide a category to your announcement post. You can also provide various tags to this post.

Name the category and the tags carefully – they should be your keywords.

Advantages of blogs on WordPress.org and Blogspot / Blogger

There are multiple benefits of this strategy.

You get keyword rich backlinks to your blog or website.
Google and other search engines index WordPress and Blogspot very regularly.

Your announcement blogs would get listings on WordPress.org and BlogSpot.com under the tags and category you have specified. Since you would have specified your keywords here, people would come to these announcement blogs when they look for your keywords.

And since these blogs would have a post linking to your original blog, there is a fair chance that they would come to your blog – which means additional traffic!

Exercise caution – Don’t go overboard

Yes, there are many benefits. But please be advised that you can’t overdo this. That would be spamming.

Having one or two announcement blogs / posts is fine, but starting many such blogs just to get backlinks would take you to the “not so good” (read: blackhat) territory.

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How to get your blog or website indexed quickly by Google

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:45:06 +0000

Getting into the Google club

You put in a lot of hard work in

Choosing the domain name
Selecting the hosting provider & hosting plan
Choosing the blogging platform

Indexed Fast By Google Countdown

You also spend hours on

Selecting the theme
Setting up various plugins (including SEO plugins)
Writing blog posts and publishing them (with one keyword per post)

Now what? What is the next step? Do you just keep waiting for Google to come to your blog or website?

(Image source)

How can you get your blog or website indexed by Google real quick? Is there a fast-track process?

Here are the things that you can do to get you blog or website indexed faster by Google.

Get incoming links

Try to get some incoming links from other blogs and websites in your niche. If possible, try to get them from sites that already have some traffic, and have a good page rank (PR).

If the blog you have started is not your first blog, you can easily leverage your existing blog to get some links to the new blog!

For more on getting backlinks, please check out “Where to get backlinks from for good SEO“.

Produce fresh content

To make Google come to your blog, and to keep it coming back frequently, you need to produce fresh content constantly.

Write blog posts regularly, and Google should be at your doorstep sooner rather than later!

Utilize the power of Social Media

Submit some of your good articles to social media sites. These include (but are definitely not limited to):

Digg
Stumbleupon
Delicious
Mixx
Technorati

Google constantly indexes these social media websites, and any link back to your blog would be followed very quickly!

If you know some power users for these sites and can get your articles submitted through them, even better! This would mean that:

Your post gets a presence on the social media site, and Google would find you
Even more users get exposed to your blog post submission (due to the power user status of the submitter), and you get increased traffic at your blog. And possibly, some backlinks as well!

Use Twitter

It is still unclear if Google would follow & index your links posted in Twitter (due to the “no follow” attribute, but if nothing else, it would drive traffic to your blog and might earn you some back links!

Implement Google AdSense

When you have Google AdSense on your blog, Google needs to know the content of your blog before it can start presenting the context sensitive ads.

What does this mean? It means that Google indexes you blog to find out what it contains!

This may or may not mean immediate inclusion in the Google index, but it surely helps.

Implement Google Site Search

The logic is same as above – to give accurate search results for your blog, Google needs to know its contents. This means that Google quickly indexes you site when you use Site Search!

How to improve SEO by reducing your page load time

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:56:04 +0000

High page load time = Bad SEO

In “How the page load time of your blog or website impacts SEO”, we saw that a high page load time frustrates your users.

This results in bad user experience, which ultimately leads to lower ranking on the SERPs.

What increases the page load time?

There can be many culprits that contribute to a high page load time.

You can improve on most of the factors and thus, can improve the page load time. However, there isn’t much you can do for certain other factors.

Let’s have a look at the things that affect your page load time.

Reduce Page Load Time For SEO

Images on the webpage or post

Images are the biggest culprits in increasing the load time of your web pages. Both the size and number of images matter.

(Image source)

Here are a few tips as far as images go:

Try not to have too many images in a post: 1 or 2 are just fine, unless you write about photography!
Try not to have very large images in your posts: Larger the size of the image, the larger would be the file size. And the longer it would take to load.
Actually resize the image, not just through HTML attributes: If you find a large image (say 1200 * 800), and want to display it only as a small image (say 500 * 333), don’t just use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes of the IMG tag to reduce the display size. Reduce the image dimensions physically using an image editing tool, as that would reduce the size of the image (and therefore reduce the loading time).
Optimize the image for web usage: Use only properly optimized images, as they are smaller in size. At the least, try to reduce the color depth as long as it doesn’t impact the way the image looks.

External scripts

Many of us put lots of scripts on our blogs or websites. These can be visitor tracking scripts (Google analytics, Sitemeter, etc), advertising scripts (Google AdSense, Chitika, etc), or some other scripts.

Of course, these scripts serve a purpose. However, refrain from having too many of them. These scripts call some function on another server, and are therefore inherently time consuming.

The higher the number of such scripts on your blog, the longer it would take to load. So, limit the number of scripts on your blog to reduce the load time.

Badges and Widgets

Various badges and widgets also call some remote server, and therefore reduce the page load time.

Is it necessary to show a badge of ALL the networks that you participate in? Is it not enough to show just a few? Similarly, is it necessary to have a lot of widgets on your blog?

Various badges and widgets not only increase the page load time, but also distract your readers from the content. This impacts the user experience negatively. (Remember, good user experience means good SEO).

Therefore, try to have only a limited number of badges and widgets on your blog or website.

Flash and Multimedia files

Flash and multimedia files (like video and audio files) are large in size, and naturally take a long time loading.

Again, reduce the number of these files in order to improve your page load time.

HTML Size

People use different softwares to create HTML files. Most software work just fine, but some (like Microsoft Word) create HTML files that are HUGE!!

Try to avoid creating HTML files using such software, or use some tool or utility to trim the HTML code created by such a software.

This would reduce the file size, and improve the loading time of the web page.

Server Load

Another reason for a high page load time can be the load on your server – if the server is getting too many requests to service, it would slow down considerably. This happens mostly on blogs and websites using a shared server.

There is not much you can do in this case – you can either shift to a better hosting provider, or can upgrade to a dedicated server that hosts only your blog or website.

Conclusion

Follow these tips, and the load time of your web pages would improve drastically. This would improve the user experience on your blog, and would therefore result in better SEO.

How the page load time of your blog or website impacts SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:58:24 +0000

Page Load Time And SEO

How page load time impacts the user experience

Have you ever been to a blog or website, and felt frustrated because it took ages to load? This isn’t very unfamiliar, right?

Such an experience can be really frustrating. And it is more than likely that you wouldn’t want to visit that blog again!

This is a clear demonstration of the fact that a high page load time adversely impacts the user experience on your blog or website.

(Image source)

Today, we want everything fast. We want everything right now. And with an increase in the speed of our internet connections, we want web pages to load instantly as well.

What is an acceptable page load time?

So, what does “instantly” mean? Is it 1 second, or 15 seconds? What is a good page load time?

Of course, a lot depends on the personal preference (and tolerance!) of the visitor. However, we can have a simple rule of thumb.

I would say that a page load time of about 10 seconds on a 128 Kbps internet connection should be acceptable in most cases.

Page load time and SEO

We know that search engines are paying a close attention to the user experience on your blog or website. Therefore, it is very important to improve the user experience of your blog in order to improve SEO.

The equation is simple:

High page load time = Frustrated visitor = Bad user experience = Bad SERP rankings = Bad SEO

As a corollary,

Low page load time = Happy visitor = Good user experience = Good SERP rankings = Good SEO

Simple, isn’t it?

To know how to reduce the page load time in order to improve the SEO, please read “How to improve SEO by reducing your page load time“.

Blog SEO Expert

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