Google's latest version of its Analytics website-analysis tool - Universal Analytics - offers all sorts of bells and whistles for the SEO fan. That's all very exciting but what happens when the Universal Analytics installation doesn't work?
Read MoreAn arcane bit of code-tweaking advice for users of Wordpress and the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin. Read on if you're interested!
Read MoreGoogle rolls out a new algorithm to improve the quality of search results, specifically to downgrade low quality sites...
Read MoreOver recent months we have worked on a number of projects with a fixture of Adelaide's home-improvement industry, Homeplus Improvements. We have been able to assist Homeplus Improvements with a number of behind-the-scenes technical details - the sorts of things we touched on in our post "Know your domain details" - in order to launch a new website to support Homeplus Improvements's salespeople and sales activities.
Has it worked?
Hot on the heels of the commentary in our last newsletter regarding the importance of your website's geophysical location for search engine listings ("Location, location, location") comes news that Google now includes your website's load time as a factor influencing your Google Ranking. Load time? What? Well, what this means is that Google will consider your website to be less important if it loads slowly. If you can click on a link to your company website then go and make a cup of coffee before the frontpage loads, you should be worried.
Here's Matt Cutts from Google explaining why:
So how can you speed up your website and get back in Google's good books?
Here are some quick tips:
Make sure your server admin has tuned your web server for speed. A simple tweak like enabling HTTP compression on the server can speed up your site's load time by a huge degree.
Make sure your site is well-designed at the code level. Clean efficient code makes for a faster-loading website. If you wouldn't know a well-coded site from a badly-coded one, talk to someone who would!
If you have a database-driven site, consider implementing a software solution to enable your site to be presented as static pages. Every millisecond that your site has to talk to its database now counts against you.
Optimise your site's images. Image files like GIFs, JPGs, and PNGs each have advantages and disadvantages. If you don't know why you should choose one over the other, you may be slowing your site down unnecessarily.
When Google announced this change to its ranking policy, we made several "speedup" tweaks to one of our testing sites and saw improvements immediately. If your website is crucial to your business and you need someone to translate the search-engine technojargon into plain English, talk to us today about Search Engine Optimisation.
--Simon
Google's search engine is based on an link analysis algorithm known as PageRank. Google occasionally tweaks the PageRank algorithm to place greater or lesser emphasis on particular variables in order to improve its service. One of the things that Google has done recently is to include the geographical location of a website's server as an influential factor. Where your website is hosted now affects your Google ranking.
Read MoreIn November last year Marketing Magazine Australia published an article entitled "The death of print: the final days of the phone book" observing that the White and Yellow Pages directories published by Sensis"look likely to go with way of the rotary dial phone" and that "Sensis needs to prepare for the inevitable". We're not advocates for spending money on advertising in the White and Yellow Pages. When we asked around the office "when was the last time you looked in an actual White or Yellow Pages?" the response in every instance was a variation of "so long ago that I can't remember".
Read MoreBased just south of Adelaide in McLaren Vale, Chilli Chocolate Marketing is a boutique marketing agency with a particular focus on email marketing, customer retention, and relationships.
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