Liberty Interactive - Search Marketing Blog » SEO

Creative 404 Pages: Page Not Found What To Do?

Liberty Tsighis — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:29:59 +0000

One of the things we look at during our Search Marketing Site Assessments for clients, is the use of 404 pages no matter what industry you are in. We always recommend having a custom 404 page. A 404 page is when a user discovers a “page not found” on your site.

How does this happen and why should you care?
Well, it may seem like a completely elementary thing to put in place however if someone comes to your site from another site (i.e. they linked to your site – maybe a blog post or old web page). If there is not an appropriate redirect process in place the user will be sent to a “page not found” or 404 error. You have control over what gets displayed on this page and if it is a generic 404 (no branding just black and white) it can mean losing a visitor forever or you could help them discover the appropriate page they were looking for, thus keeping them on your site. Think of it providing a bit of customer service to your visitor – if they entered through the wrong door, you would want to show them the appropriate one or guide them to the location they were looking for.

While creativity and humor might get you far with anyone, it also helps to be…well, helpful. If your page is useful in guiding the user to the area or page they were looking for then you are more likely to create a better customer experience.

A few suggestions for your 404 error page:
- At the minimum have your logo and main navigation on the page, better yet use a page template from your site that will help customize it to your look and feel
- Have a link to your home page or better yet a listing of links to popular sections on your site. You may also want to provide a link to the sitemap and promote it as a “full directory of site pages.”

Here are a few examples of 404 pages that we think work while also maintaining the brand personality:

Thanks to fab404.com for some great examples – check out others to for more ideas.
P.S. We’ve got some work to do ourselves. Do as we say not as we do .

Oh No Daddy! GoDaddy Redirects Cause Major SEO Issue, now what?

Liberty Tsighis — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 17:54:15 +0000

If you are a GoDaddy customer you will want to read this.

Part of our weekly SEO routine for clients is to check search engine Webmaster tool accounts, in doing so we usually find something interesting, disturbing or exciting. This week, we noticed that a domain that we permanently redirected to a new one back in December was showing as a top inbound linking site to the domain in which is was supposed to be redirected.

We asked ourselves, “How could this be?” Was the site moved to a new host without our knowledge? Was the domain being redirected properly?

And so our investigation began.

Our Findings:
This client is a GoDaddy customer and back in December we had permanently forwarded the domains in GoDaddy’s Domain Control panel which at that time issued a proper permanent redirect telling the servers and search engines that this was indeed a permanent redirect (otherwise known as a 301 redirect).

Today, when we checked the server headers it said that the redirect was a temporary redirect (otherwise known as a 302 redirect). We went a step further to investigate some of the other domains that also had been setup as permanent redirects in the GoDaddy system. And to our dismay, they are all showing as temporary redirects.

We logged into GoDaddy to make sure the permanent redirect settings were correct for our domains AND…they were.

We then called GoDaddy to understand why the domain settings marked to permanent redirect (301) were showing as a temporary redirect (302) in our third party checking tool.

The GoDaddy tech support person told us that “all of their forwarding now only issues a temporary 302 redirect” and if we wanted “to make it a permanent 301 we would have to do that at the hosting level.” They also could not tell us what type of redirect would be issued if we actually selected temporary redirect as an option or why there are two choices if they both do the same thing.

There are three situations for when you would use redirects:*

If you are launching a new site and switching to a new domain.
If you have deleted, removed, changed or are planning to change web page URLs.
If you have a list of URLs that are derivations or misspellings of your company name/main site domain that you want to forward to your main site.

*Redirects can be configured for site domains and specific web pages/URLs.

There are two types of preferred redirects for these situations:

a) 301 which is for files that have been permanently moved.
b) 302 which is for files that have been temporarily moved.

Why are redirects such a big deal?

In the SEO world, redirects affect everything. A redirect tells servers, search engines and browsers how to handle the domain when someone requests it. If a page is deleted, a site is relaunched, or a page is renamed it is important for both SEO and usability to make sure you have those old pages going to either a new relevant page or appropriate URL.

If URLs/domains are not configured properly you can lose valuable search engine visibility. Keep in mind that people and sites are linking to your content and inbound links are one of the key influencing factors to search engine rankings. Use of 301 redirects should be used to preserve search engine rankings and any inbound links to that particular URL. This way search engines will index the new address instead of keeping the outdated URL. It is the best option to avoid negatively impacting search engine ranking.

The reason you don’t want to use a 302 redirect is this signals to the search engine that the old URL should be maintained in the index as an active URL, it just has been moved for now. This causes none of your new URLs to be indexed.

If a search engine doesn’t know where to go and runs into a dead-end URL/page this can impact your search visibility not to mention your user experience if they follow a link to a URL that no longer exists.

How do I fix my forwarding domains in GoDaddy to be properly configured for permanent redirection?

Note: If you are redirecting a domain, you DON’T want to just switch the DNS to your main site – this will cause a mirrored site and create a duplicate content issue for you. Search engines will not like that and you may get penalized for it by search engines.

The first step is to remove or turn off the forwarding in your GoDaddy domain control panel. Go to Domain Management and find the domain, and go to Forwarding and click on Manage next to it. Edit to turn off.
If the web site you are redirecting to is hosted with GoDaddy, add the domain as an additional domain to the root through the Hosting Control panel.
If the web site you are redirecting to is NOT hosted with GoDaddy, change the DNS records in the Domain Control panel to point to the IP address of the site you are redirecting to. Add the domain as an additional domain in your host’s control panel. Or your virtual hosts file.
Add the following code to the .htaccess file for the main site. Make sure to create a RewriteCond and ReWriteRule line for each domain you are redirecting. Make sure to redirect both the www and non-www version of the domain if needed. And always immediately test your .htaccess to make sure there are no errors. .htaccess can be tricky, better to be safe than sorry. So always backup your .htaccess before making any changes.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^newdomain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [nc,r=301]
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^olddomain.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [nc,R=301]
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^www.olddomain.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [nc,R=301]

It is wise to speak with an SEO consultant prior to making your site live to the redirects of old pages and domains are appropriately handled. If you are relaunching a site or looking to increase your online visibility? Give us a call regarding your SEO.

6 Ways To Get Your Google Places Page to Rank Higher

Katie S. — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 18:13:26 +0000

Whether it’s your own company or a client’s business, having a Google Places page is key to visibility within Google. In 2009, Google was in the deal room with Yelp to purchase the local review site but the deal fell through. A few months ago, Google revealed their own “Yelp-like” product, Hotpot. Google is making a big push into the local market with plenty of attention going to location-based applications (such as Foursquare, Facebook Places) it is important that you are maximizing on your own visibility within the most popular search engine especially now that Google is placing more of an emphasis on local results and blending them with organic search results.

We recently had a chance to hear local search guru, David Mihm discuss the ins and outs of local search that are useful for organizations of any size.

Here are 6 Ways To Get Your Google Places Page to Rank Higher:

Claim your listing if you haven’t. How can you tell if it is claimed? Complete a search in Google Maps, that is the easiest and quickest way to locate your listing. Look in the upper right corner about a quarter of the way down the page (see image below). If your place exists and is not claimed, go through the steps to claim and verify it – then read the rest of this post .

Reviews are more important thank you think(we’ll keep hitting you over the head with this one over and over). Reviews are one of the key factors that can help your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) as well as the local listing results that show up within the SERP.
Tip: Put together a strategy to get a steady flow of reviews coming in monthly rather than a bunch all at once and then nothing at all. Google likes to see consistency. One way to do this is through your social media outlets. Another thing to do is if you use Groupon or any coupon sites try to capture the emails of those who purchased and follow up with them to have them write a review of their experience. Of course we’d all like positive reviews, but as long as you have a good product and good service you should receive good reviews.

When claiming your business make sure your title is representative of your business- do not stuff it with keywords. You want to use descriptive words. You might be able to get away with one or two keywords depending on your company, but remember the algorithm Google uses for local results is not the same as the one used for organic results.

YouTube video’s may help your rank so if you have them add them to your local listing. Also fill it with images. Tip: To optimize your videos add a caption file to your videos, title and description.

Use the maximum number of description categories available (currently 4), use one default category and then create custom categories for the remaining fields. When creating a custom category try using the statement “my business is a [fill in the blank]” as your format. Do not put any geographical terms in as a category- that’s a big no-no.

Multiple branches and/or specialty divisions with the same address should have individual pages. If your business is a large business with multiple branches or specialties all at the same address and there are more areas than categories, don’t worry you can list them separately. For example, if your business is a hospital with different specialty areas – each one of those specialties can have its own Google Places page as long as each area has a different phone number they can and should be created and listed individually.

A big thanks to David Mihm for his support and sharing this great information with us.

Local Series: Getting Your Business Listing Setup in Search Engines (Part 2)

Katie S. — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 05:03:28 +0000

If you missed Part 1 of Getting Your Business Listing Setup in Search Engines start there first.

The verification process can sometimes be the most challenging part of setting up your local business listing in search engines. The process can be easy and at the same time difficult for numerous reasons. Below we share with you the various ways to verify your account and what we have often experienced when setting up listings on behalf of our clients during the verification process.

GOOGLE (aka Google Places, this listing will also show up in Google Maps)
www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

Creating a listing: We recommend you use a general email account with your company domain name. For example, marketing@companyname.com. You do not need a gmail account to setup your listing on Google Places. Google prefers you use an email address with the company domain in it as further verification and legitimacy of your listing.

Easy way: phone call. Google will typically place a call within minutes that will give you a PIN number. The PIN number will need to be entered during setup, this is the key step to get your listing verified. We have experienced both never receiving a call and a PIN number left on voicemail. The good news is Google will let you request a PIN again. If this does not work you will ultimately be left without the call option and going the route of the slow way – postcard verification.

Slow way: postcard. You’ll need to keep an eye out for the postcard, it will be small and look like junk mail so be paranoid. This postcard will contain your PIN number. It can take up to 2 weeks to receive the postcard so make sure you have kept your login information handy and in a safe place.

View a 45-minute video on How-To set up your business on Google.

BING (aka Bing Business Listing Center)
https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx

Easy way: phone call. This process is exactly like Google’s except that Bing provides you with the PIN number and you enter it over the phone when they call you (versus receiving the PIN over the phone and entering it online).

Slow way: a letter or postcard will be sent. It takes almost two weeks to receive the letter. It is typically dated just a couple days after you’ve submitted your local listing.

YAHOO! (aka Yahoo! Local Listings)
http://listings.local.yahoo.com/

Yahoo! sends an email confirmation as verification of your listing. Keep in mind this email will be sent to the person who is listed as the contact in the contact information you filled in, which should also be a general email address for your company.*

*Keep in mind that Yahoo! is no longer a search engine. Currently they are still maintaining their local listings and offer a basic and an enhanced listing (you pay for it).

Local Series: Getting Your Business Listing Setup in Search Engines (Part 1)

Katie S. — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 23:47:48 +0000

With attention surrounding geo-location services (like Foursquare, Gowalla, Groupon) and significant enhancements in local business listings in search engines (Google Places, bing). We wanted to focus on creating a “Local” blog post series featuring helpful ways for businesses to garner further visibility online utilizing these offerings as well as what to be aware of when participating. We’ll focus on local business listings and a few free marketing ideas for you to take advantage of. So, let’s begin.

Setting Up Your Local Business Listing on Search Engines
When doing local search it’s best to start with the big three. While Yahoo!’s search results have now been replaced with bing’s search engine results, many things are still in tact – this includes business listings for local search. For the most part all three search engines (SE) ask for the same information for a business.

We’ve compiled a quick list to help you prepare for setting up a local search account for your organization:

Basic Information:
- Business name
- Address
- Telephone number (some SE’s allow multiple phone numbers)
- Toll free number (if applies)
- Web site (some SE’s allow multiple websites)
- Email (some SE’s allow multiple emails)
- Fax

Background Information
There are a good amount of sections that can be filled out; you want to fill in as much information as you can. Google recently made some big enhancement to how local search results from Google Places appears in their search results and it is highly recommended to fill in as much information as possible to help your results. Make sure to put in everything you can think of that represents your company.

This includes:
- Description (Google limit is 200 characters)
- Image (logo or any images, great way to incorporate Flickr if client has images there)
- Video (great way to incorporate YouTube if client has videos there)
- Hours (if apply)
- Payment methods (if apply)
- Brands carried or sold by client. Great way to insert keywords that are specific to your client’s products and or services.
- Specialties. Great way to insert keywords that are specific to your client’s products and or services.
- Slogan or tagline.
- Other requests are for professional associations, languages spoken, parking, and more.

Category Details
There are categories to select that best represent your business. You want to ensure that you select the best choice categories as these may help with your visibility within organic search results. Some of the categories can be hidden and you may have to browse to find what is most appropriate to make sure you aren’t missing any. Some SE’s allow more category entries than others. Try to fill in as many categories as you can, this too will be affected by Google Places search results.

At this point you will want to review all of the choices you have made and all of the information you have entered. Make sure to double and triple check everything as editing in the future may not be as easy as you think. Once you have thoroughly checked all of your information and are happy with your location search entry, proceed to the verification process.

Stay tuned for next week’s post on the details of the verification process and detailed requirements.

Social Search Results and Beyonce Is Pregnant

Liberty Tsighis — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 23:36:43 +0000

This morning I received an email about Google’s update to their social search results, a feature Google has been experimenting visibly with for the last year.

While I was impressed with the technology back then it was really nothing to write home about. To Google’s defense, they have been determined to understand the value of integrating social within the framework of search. I made a short video clip back in January, when the Toyota domino recalls were happening – this is what it looked like nearly a year ago.

Since then, Google has made vast improvements and beneficial enhancements to how they have integrated social into search. It is less intrusive. They show the real-time updates subtly instead of the constant scrolling updates.

If you do choose to click on the recent social updates below the news results, you’ll be taken to a real-time search results update page, a trending timeline and the – pièce de résistance – top links! See video clip below.

Initially, I looked at this page and said, “Okay, this is pretty cool but who cares?” So I took a closer look and came up with a few good ways all of us marketers may be able to take advantage of this new offering from Google:

Trending

Share Something New: The majority of people who are RTing on Twitter, commenting/sharing on Facebook and other social platforms are most likely saying the same thing over and over and over again. This is your chance to share something new. Join in the banter, but offer a fresh perspective, valuable piece of information or other. Something that out of all 585 comments yours will standout because you are offering a new sound into the noise. Incidentally, at the time when I looked on Wordloo.com this morning to get the top trending search, the most popular item was “Beyonce Pregnant” – just in case you are curious about the title of this post – we thought we would play along in the trend and offer up some new information to be shared (highly irrelevant to the folks that care about Beyonce’s pregnancy, by the way, Beyonce congratulations).

Profile Audiences: Without going into too much detail on this, clearly the folks commenting on Beyonce being pregnant are not the same folks commenting on Virginia Thomas, but it is a good way to understand what your target audience is most interested in (if you don’t know this already).

Top Links

Early Bird Gets the Worm: If you can’t be the first to create the news, you can be the first to comment on it, and quite possibly get a link from it. If you can watch (obsessively) for trending topics in your industry, Google will show you who is the most authoritative for that trend – get a comment on there – maybe with your link and you’ve got exposure.

Identify Authority Sites: If you aren’t the early bird, you may still be able to get the worm. By observing which sites are visible for your target topics, you will discover new opportunities for SEO, such as who to interview or be interviewed by, guest write for and comment on.

These are just a few ways Google’s new social search can benefit you, there are several more.

What is your take on social search results?

Content: The key to findable and authoritative websites

Liberty Tsighis — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 05:01:54 +0000

In an era when people spend more than half of their waking hours consuming media, the content on your website has never been more important. And likewise, with the vast amount of redundant or otherwise useless information that populates much of the Internet, having a well maintained and well-sourced website has never been more valuable.

Is your site findable?

Content is the key for findable and authoritative websites. It also helps build your brand by injecting both a manageable personality and a point of view into your business.

Regardless of how many keywords you upload to your Adwords account or how much time and money you spend on delivering your ads to prospective customer’s eyes, you’re missing a significant segment of the market if you don’t have keyword-rich, focused and fresh content on your website. Also consider that your “best” ads may not even be showing due to a perceived lack of relevancy to what’s on the destination web page.

What the newspaper industry’s woes have shown us is that the democratization of information is expanding daily. In order to capitalize on this fact, everyone from non-profit organizations to publicly owned companies should be turning their websites into information sources, not simply glorified advertisements or electronic storefronts.

The benefits of content

The first benefit to turning your website into an information source includes increased organic traffic. The more quality information you have on your site, the more there is for browsers to connect with in web searches. One of the best parts of organic traffic is that it’s free, while online advertising can cost a significant amount of money to produce a beneficial ROI. Also, good quality content can produce targeted organic traffic and ROI long after its creation, unlike paid mediums.

Coinciding with your content creation should be an intensive marketing effort to increase your content’s visibility. This includes link building, networking with industry related blogs and news sites, actively participating in social media websites and posting to message boards and forums. Still, first and foremost, regular content production is the key.

Second, you’ll establish your business as a reputable source for the latest news and information about the product or service you provide – preferably before someone else does.

Finally, you’ll show search engines that your site is worthwhile to Internet surfers, which will ultimately increase your website’s credibility and search ranking.

While written content is arguably the most important part of your overall content strategy, multi-media content including videos, graphics, polls and the like, all combine to create a complete content package.

Once you have a content strategy nailed down – maybe you’ve even created an editorial calendar – you need to identify your audience. Who are you writing for? As tempting as it may be, you’re not just writing about your company, product or service. You’re writing for the people you hope to turn into customers. What do they want to know?

With all that in mind, go forth and start producing that content! And remember, the existing information on your site continuously needs to be optimized with updated keyword research and competitive analysis. Keeping your website on the cutting edge of web searches is a never ending process.

We can help you create a viable content and online strategy, give us a buzz.

Image via all-sorts.biz

4 Pieces of Advice To Get Links Approved On Quality Blogs and Web sites

Katie S. — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 05:03:45 +0000

Link building can get a bad rap sometimes. Often people think it’s just spam, but really link building is a very beneficial component of a successful SEO campaign. Some companies buy links or hire companies to post automated links (which is heavily frowned upon by search engines and degrades the Internet experience, in my opinion). Why would you want a computer to do your work, when you can get better results by posting legitimate quality links?

Here are four pieces of advice to getting your comments and links approved:

1. Be real. I find the most successful way to get your back links approved is to be your authentic self. Go ahead, state your opinion on the topic, as long as you can tie it to the topic of your link or keyword. This way you’re posting a real comment as if there was no link there. Saying “Great Post, I will bookmark your site and read more.” is not a real comment, it’s spam.

2. Be relevant and respectful. Always make sure that the blog or article you’re posting a comment to is related to the link you’re posting. Once you find a relevant site, read the article and leave comments that reference something that was mentioned in the article.

3. Be a social non-spammer. If you think of link building as providing the author and readers with helpful information or added value in your commenting versus trying to get a link, you will likely see an increase in the number of approved comments. In my experience, being myself has worked to my advantage when link building. Occasionally my efforts are misinterpreted as spam since I’m including a link. On the other hand, there are occasions when people comment back and a conversation begins, which to me is very valuable because you are building a trust with the individual whose blog or news source you are leaving a comment on. They know you are leaving a legitimate comment and the fact that there is a link there is fine by them because they either like that your comment was real and related to their post or know that you may be working an angle by link building, but they are okay with that since you are adding value.

4. Don’t take it personally. It will get frustrating at times when your comments and links are not approved. Experiences like these can teach you about your link building approach and technique. For instance, you may find that you need to shorten your comment or try another approach, or maybe the topics don’t relate like you thought they did. There are so many factors that can determine if your link gets approved or not, but the bottom line is to not get discouraged and to keep it real.

photo love to: seattleclouds.com

Google Instant: Is It Really and How Will it Affect You?

Liberty Tsighis — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:03:35 +0000

Google launched a new feature to their search engine yesterday called “Google Instant” that allows users to start entering their search and based on past searches will “predict” what you are looking for. They claim it to be a “search before you type” feature that will make it much faster for users to find what they are looking for. After previous attempts at launching a similar feature in 1999 and 2003, they have decided that Instant is the winner.

Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful. – Official Google Blog

Is it really instant?
It’s not really that instant. It actually causes several problems. For instance, let’s say you are a Librarian in the New York Public Library which houses 11 million books. Imagine if every visitor who came through your doors asking you for help started their search with one letter and then added the next and then the next and so on and so forth, very much like a “hurry up and wait” scenario. That is what is happening with Google Instant. Each letter now acts as an individual query, pinging the search engine database on every keystroke. Which now means, it is not really that instant for new searches since there will be no prediction and the information you are looking for may actually be delivered much more slowly to you.

Also, there is a usability issue with prematurely hitting the enter button that causes further interruption in getting results quicker. There might be a vulnerability within Google’s automated query detection system. How will they determine which is an actual search query by the user or a script? I’ve been punished already for prematurely hitting the enter button, to which Google greeted me with the “Sorry, we think you are sending automated queries” screen and forced me to enter a captcha code in order to view search results.

Is it really a positive game changer for search engine users? What about Adwords advertisers?
In the past 24 hours, Instant hasn’t made my searching easier or quicker it feels more like the old “paperclip assistant” interruption on Microsoft Word than it seems to be productive.

In USA Today, Kevin Lee, CEO of search consultancy Didit, compares Google Instant to a manic companion who incessantly interrupts you as you’re trying to say something, never allowing you to finish a sentence. Google has set out to “influence what you’re seeing and distract you to view their recommendations,” says Lee. “You start to lose the individuality of what the searcher set out to look for, and you end up with search lemmings.”

How will Instant impact search advertisers using the Adwords program? If indeed, users get sidetracked during their search that means more irrelevant eyeballs on ads which means potentially a higher cost to the advertiser and less targeted visitors to ads.

Is Google Instant going to kill SEO?
No, as long as folks are using keyword based search engines SEO will still be relevant. Google Instant is a user interface change, not an indexation change, you still need to be indexed to be shown. The bottom line is you still should include SEO in your online strategy. Google won’t instantly (pun intended) know what you are relevant for so it is important they know how to appropriately index and categorize your web properties as well as where to rank you in search engine results. If you’re worried about how Google Instant will impact your SEO initiatives, don’t be. As long as you adhere to best practices and provide relevant, targeted content to users you should be fine.

In an article in Adage this morning, Google executives noted that natural search results, and techniques companies use to land higher in Google search results, won’t change. Johanna Wright, director of product management for Google Instant, said one difference is that they will direct users to “page two” results faster. “As you continue typing and narrowing your search, the instantly changing and refreshing results below the search box will be giving you more relevant results,” she said. “So if you previously looked on the second page, now those same results come to the top of the pile for you.”

For SEO and marketing professionals it may in fact prove beneficial as a research tool. “What may be useful is seeing the most common searches and getting results faster than using a SERP rank tool,” said Nathan Burgess, Senior Account Executive at BlissPR, a B2B public relations firm. Burgess also believes Instant may drop site bounce rates, and hits/refreshes to Google’s servers on bad searches and may educate the normal user on how to best use search.

Perhaps, this new feature will indeed change how our brain thinks and uses search. It is too early to tell. But, thinking back on all of the things that are “instant” doesn’t paint a great picture in my mind of quality. Instant coffee (taste), pudding (taste), polaroid pictures (still have to wait for it to develop and the pictures fade with time), fast food (unhealthy). So while Google Instant is merely a few hours old (at least in the public eye) we’ll have to see if it can give “instant” a better name.

The Trinity of Technical SEO: Latency, Indexation and Bandwidth

Mike Swan — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 19:25:46 +0000

The Trinity of Technical SEO: Latency, Indexation and Bandwidth
As most of us know, SEO goes way beyond Titles, Tags and keyword selection. Gone are the days where heavily optimizing a page for “crazy purple widgets” will get you where you want to be. As the Search Engines focus on their core goal of providing the most authoritative and relevant results for each query we as Internet Marketers are faced with a new challenge. As web technology progresses, we must look beyond what a site “says” and look at what a site “is”. Structure and construction become even more important.

Site Latency: How fast do your site pages load?
Let’s first start with Latency. The Latency of a site is the speed in which the page loads for a visitor. There are many factors that contribute to the Latency of a web page including, but not limited to, site construction, reliance on external resources, server capacity, page size, etc. We do our best to reach a happy medium with the factors we can control. Not every site can afford Google-size processors and server capacity; most are sharing their server with hundreds or thousands of other sites. When this is the case we have to focus on factors we have more of an influence on like how our site is constructed and how bulky it is. In the end there is only so much speed you can get out of your site for your given budget.

How does one assess site Latency?
There are many tools out there that can be used for testing the latency of a site. Some are paid which we use extensively, and some are free, which we also use extensively. One of the most useful resources is Google Webmaster Tools. In April 2010, Google officially announced they would be incorporating site speed as one of the 200+ site signals used in determining search rankings and now have become sort of the de facto authority on this topic. Let’s use an actual site example where we are using Google Webmaster tools.

This is a site that relies very heavily on external resources, with a lot of multimedia. There is no way around this, so the speed of the site is limited by the speed of anywhere from 6-12 other servers to provide it with the data it needs to load a page. Here is a screenshot from Google Webmaster tools showing the time it takes to load a page:

As you can see, over the last 90 days the sites pages load on average just over 4 seconds. This is a site that has been receiving exponentially more traffic over this time frame. I want to also make the point that in the third week of June the site was redesigned and recoded for a better user experience and greater efficiency. As such, you can see the line is very erratic until July when the spikes smooth out a bit and on average the time has decreased. Remember we are only talking a spread of 1.3 seconds between the high and low. Not a huge amount off is it? Most visitors wouldn’t even notice a difference. But Search Engines do.

This brings us to Bandwidth.
Bandwidth is defined as “the maximum amount of information (bits/second) that can be transmitted along a channel”. Why does this matter? Search Engines have a limited amount of capacity available. Granted, their “limited capacity” far exceeds anything most of us can dream of, but it is also a really big Internet to crawl (over a trillion pages). Based on this, the Search Engines will allocate a certain amount of resources to crawling a particular website based on its perceived value (whether it is stated or not). CNN.com is going to get a substantially larger portion of Google’s resources than my Dog in Funny Hats blog.

So what does this mean to the rest of us? It means that we have to make the best use of the resources that are given to us. Basically, when Google comes a-knockin’ it is in your best interest to make sure it has the most clear path through your site and can get as much information as possible before it leaves for its next appointment (probably cnn.com). This is why building the most search-friendly efficient site is critical.

Below is a screenshot of the same site, same time period as before, this time showing how much bandwidth is afforded this site by Google in a given day:

Notice the trend of increasing bandwidth up until the third week of June, when the new site design was launched. Immediately before the 2.0 version of the site was launched the site was receiving a peak high of almost 89,000KB of attention from Google. Then it decreased substantially and immediately to 12,000KB and has since settled in somewhere around 39,000KB. The initial impulse is to look at this and say that a mistake was made, Google isn’t as interested in crawling this site anymore. This next screenshot shows the truth – how many pages is Google crawling in a given day:

This chart pretty much speaks for itself. Based on this chart we can see, that while the Latency of the site has only moved within a narrow band, the bandwidth usage has dropped considerably, which has allowed Google to crawl more pages on a given visit. This is a strong case for optimizing your entire site presence, not just your Titles and Tags. During this time period of this example, no on-site SEO elements were changed.

And by the way this third chart mimics the organic site traffic trend as well. How well is your site performing, contact us today to conduct a Technical Site Assessment and start improving or rebuilding your online presence?