Posts Tagged google

What Every Web Designer Needs To Know About Site Performance

Posted by amm on Friday, 20 August, 2010

WebSpeed Optimization Overview

Since Google’s recent announcement that web page load times are now a ranking factor web designers and developers have been required to pay additional attention to site performance considerations. Here are just a handful of considerations that today’s responsible web developers need to keep in mind.

Most of todays web pages are made up of a collection of components including CSS files, javascript, images and often movies. Minimising the number of elements and therefore the number of HTTP requests necessary to render a page is crucial for fast page load times.

Around 80% of the end user’s response time is consumed in waiting for all of the page elements to download. This waiting time is know to cause visitors to leave an ecommerce site and visit a faster loading competitor. Using a content delivery network to serve the static content, including javascript and CSS files, can significantly reduce this time. A content delivery network is basically a collection of servers setup in various geographic locations to efficiently deliver content to users.

As web designs become increasing complex, richer and more engaging to the end user they need an ever increasing number of components in order to render, such as Flash and javascript. On a first visit a number of HTTP requests are made in order to download these elements. If these are cached then there is less to download on a subsequent visit and this can be controlled using the ‘Expires’ header. This is commonly used for images but can be effectively used for all components including Flash and stylesheets.

Compression is another technique that every web developer should be using. GZIP is supported by around 90% of todays browsers and it can reduce the size of many elements by as much as 70%.

There are lots of additional techniques that are both good for search engine optimisation of web pages and will also improve the user experience. For example: stylesheets should be located at the top of pages and scripts at the bottom; both javascript and CSS files should be minified; and javascript and CSS should be in external files; also, reducing the number of DNS lookups and redirects is always a good idea. Good luck.

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An Essential Web Promotion Strategy That Works

Posted by amm on Sunday, 11 April, 2010

I have been a web marketer for the last ten years; there have been many changes to the way people should go about promoting their websites in this time and it can prove to be a bit of nightmare trying to keep in touch with the latest web promotion changes. What worked only three years ago could now result in your site receiving a ban or penalty on the major search engines. Link exchanges, at least on an excessive basis, and buyings links to gain a high ranking are now a thing of the past. So as we move through 2009 what types of web promotion strategy should a webmaster be following?

I am also involved with helping people to discover how to stop stuttering and I also work within the cheap holidays sector.

It is not that long ago when a person, well at least a person that had enough money, could purchase a highly ranked backward link which would then result in their website gaining a high SERPS. It did not even seem to matter if the site that was providing the link had anything to do with the site purchasing the link. We therefore saw online poker websites purchasing text link adverts on media and publishing websites which had a high page rank. A lot of people made a lot of money from selling these text links and a new marketplace formed.

But then the major power in the world of the search engines, Google, decided to move the goal posts by declaring war on this paid links market, stating that it was seriously distorting their search results. This upset a lot of people, this tends to happen when money is involved, with many accusing Google of acting as God. The reply from Google was short and to the point and went along the lines of; it is our search engine and we therefore decide our own guidelines; if you want to sell text links that is fine but it may result in some form of penalty as this goes against our current. They were basically saying you can do whatever you want with your website and at the same time we can do whatever we want with our search engine. Fair play, I say. I am actually very happy with the new guidelines; it was very hard to compete with webmasters who had deep pockets etc. Now the one-man band can compete with the big corporation; hard work, keeping up to date with the latest guidelines as well as learning from the SEO experts will once again prove to be very beneficial.

2009 brings about a new watch word in the world of web promotion; relevancy. What does this mean? Well quite simply the backward links that you attempt to obtain now need to be relevant to the site that you run for them to have a real benefit. Again this surely is common sense. If a website about gardening has a link pointing to a website about camping, is this offering any value to its site visitors? Not really.

2009 is also the year when those who are willing to work hard will finally get their rewards. Some of the old favourites such as article marketing are becoming more popular than ever but quality is now far more important than quantity. Only the best articles will be chosen to be published on other people’s websites and let’s face it they have enough articles to choose from.

Ensuring that your website is optimised correctly with the main keywords placed naturally within the text of the homepage will also be essential, be careful not to “keyword stuff” your homepage though.

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Find Out How Wordpress SEO Can Drive Targeted Visitors to Your Site

Posted by amm on Saturday, 6 March, 2010

If you’ve struggled with driving traffic and want an effective way to make it work, you need to look into Wordpress SEO. Wordpress has quickly became one of the most popular blogging platforms available. The reason for this? Well, it’s mostly due to its ease of use in addition to the tons of benefits it packs such as search engine optimization. However, you have to be fully aware of the dynamics that go into optimizing your Wordpress blog before you can see any results. All you need to be able to do is manage your Wordpress settings, then you’re golden. The following article will cover the techniques you need to master in order to achieve the desired amount of traffic.

Tags are a critical part of any blog running on Wordpress. Many people don’t create tags when they make posts – don’t do this mistake. When search engines index your website, tags are very useful. A tag can be a keyword that’s one word or two long. Your tags should work to describe your post, and be relevant to the content. – How do search engines use your post’s tags?

Tags are used to index your posts quickly, and place them in appropriate categories. What’s amazing is that tagging your blog postings is very easy and does not take much time or effort to add at the end of your post. Another way to improve your ranking is to add some internal links within your posts. Cross-reference other related posts within your own blog by linking to them in new posts. It’s quite easy to do – you can use an easy plugin or just do it on your own. When you create a post that you feel should be seen by a lot of people, you can assign it an importance by linking it to many other posts.

Many people do not categorize their blogs, but adding categories always helps in making your blog more approachable. It is not only search engines that need to find your content easily; you want your visitors to also find their way around without any hassle. That’s one of the main reasons you should have your posts in the right order. When you create categories, no matter how much information you have published, it gets in place. Not only is your category listed within the post, it is also listed in its URL if the permalinks feature is turned on. Since most times your visitors wont be staying long, its probably wise to give them a feel for your post in the URL.

As far as Wordpress SEO goes, the most important thing you can do is customize the blog’s permalinks. That means that the title of your post should also be part of the URL. You can do this just by going into the custom option settings and changing your permalink structure. Remember the default structure is made up of numbers and question marks, so it’s important to make those necessary changes as it won’t be to your benefit SEO-wise, and could have an effect on your rankings down the road.

To see the full benefits of what Wordpress has to offer, I encourage you to to check out a some premium Wordpress Themes.  Thesis Theme is one of my favorites, as it’s completely customizable. Try them out for yourself, and I think you will like the results.

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What Are The Best Affiliate Programs

Posted by amm on Sunday, 10 January, 2010

For many business partners around the world, affiliate programs are considered to be very popular tool in enhancing their market shares. Whether it is internal relationships or external relationships these affiliate programs do have their bits and pieces to make the user come on top of the business. But what are the best affiliate programs?

Without outsourcing the affiliate software just for the sake of doing it, it will make it more probable and make a better outcome with you being around for the involvement of the manufacturing. The best possible way of giving away the project is to make a project analysis prior to outsourcing it. In order to not to make the investment a loss, a proper project management from the mother company should be there.

Qualities of best affiliate programs would be a better after sales service and maintenance and a fair trade. Gaining the expected sales and profits would be the best outcome out of such program.

There are blogs which will help you find the best affiliate programs online. There are also other types of websites which will help you find the best affiliate developers online. Since these websites will have the rankings of the developers, thus customers can refer to them and select their preferred affiliate program developer.

Best marketing affiliate programs are less likely to have many upgrading and maintenance. This is due to the better analysis of the requirements prior to implementation. The development stage will also play a crucial role in determining the success of the program. At this stage a well experienced affiliate program developer will score better than a newcomer. This is expected only by well established software developer.

A must for all the successful software products will be the inter relationship between the developer and the product manufacturing company. Proper understanding from the developer about the outcome of the product will lead to many best affiliate programs. Here should be a mutual understanding between the user and the developer about the status of the end user and the ingredients of the product.

Many of these affiliate programmers could be sourced online. The responsibility though to find the best one to make the best affiliate program for your needs is within your palm tips.

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Does Affiliate Marketing Help Consumers Online

Posted by amm on Monday, 4 January, 2010

Affiliate marketing is one of the compelling forces behind online selling. In theory, it allows for a range of webmasters on the internet to make money from it in some ways. In addition, it motivates more individuals to get involved in the world of e-commerce, for the reason that opening and managing a online centered on affiliate marketing isn’t essentially costly; nevertheless, doing it will require a considerable contribution of time and/or cash.

Whilst this kind of marketing program can aid the end user, the question is whether or not it in actuality does. The jury is still out on this one and possibly will be for some time. The sizeable dilemma is that it does help the consumer, however only in some circumstances. In other conditions} the consumer is in reality hurt, in nonetheless only a small way.

What that} affiliate marketing does is agree to third party companies to work as middlemen concerning another merchant’s product or service and its prospective customers. They execute this by marketing on behalf of that company’s product by directly or indirectly marketing it on their own website. In trade they obtain a payment or flat fee for any transaction made. Oftentimes they will even be rewarded even when no purchase is done.

First let’s look at how this assists the visitor. It does subsequently by providing more ways for visitors to see products and services that are pertinent to their wishes and wants. If they drop in on a website to search out information on a special topic for case in point, that website might recommend a book they were until that time uninformed of. The person may possibly then go to see the web site where the book is being offered for purchase and wish to obtain it.

In that scenario the website visitor was helped. They had a problem, as you know was the call for for information. They visited a website for information and along with it they purchased a book to assist them even further.

An added scenario would have a individual visiting a website because they wanted to use the site’s service. The service may be a forum, a social network, a gambling site, or pretty much anything also. They may then be offered links to products linked with that service. In the gambling example they might likely spot links to poker accessories that they can order online. As you can see, this may easily be taken as a benefit as it draws the e-commerce world closer together.

The bad side to this though is that the amount of so much cash accessible to be create from affiliate marketing, that it’s becoming an completely inundated arena. This means thousands or even millions of affiliate sites are fighting for traffic solely in hopes of encouraging individual potential buyers to follow a link that will make the online marketer money.

The effect is that it can actually be more difficult for consumers to locate what they are in truth web browsing for as their internet searches are being guided onto pages that don’t in reality suggest any advantages of their own. The person wanting information, as in the first scenario, will not get it as fast for the reason that so many affiliate web pages are not genuinely a legitimate resource for information at all.

Does this darkside outweigh the upside for consumers? Opinions will differ. Which direction will things go ahead in the future? Only time can tell.

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