Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

We hear a lot of talk about ‘open’. what does it mean, and what are the implications for all of us?

According to Jonathon Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Google, being open can mean difference things to different people, so he defined it for Googlers and those who use Google and all it’s applications and tools. The Google blog says:

There are two components to our definition of open: open technology and open information. Open technology includes open source, meaning we release and actively support code that helps grow the Internet, and open standards, meaning we adhere to accepted standards and, if none exist, work to create standards that improve the entire Internet (and not just benefit Google). Open information means that when we have information about users we use it to provide something that is valuable to them, we are transparent about what information we have about them, and we give them ultimate control over their information.

In other words, Google is supposed to be doing its best to make the internet better for everyone, including that they accept user input to continually improve – and that although they collect information, they should always provide a way for you to directly control how that information is used. In addition, Google believes:

Our skills and our culture give us the opportunity and responsibility to prevent this from happening. We believe in the power of technology to deliver information. We believe in the power of information to do good. We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get… The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

How fast your pages load can impact you in Google. Not only can they impact your Quality Score for AdWords, but rumor has it that soon the entire ranking algorithm will take page-loading time into account. So how do you speed up your load time?

Use a site analyzer. These let you check for general errors and see the load times of your site; it shows tons of information about how many scripts you have, total file size, and other factors of load time.

Check for broken images and paths, as well as loading time for all of your images and scripts. Broken paths and images kill load time. As little as 1 script and 2 images that aren’t loading because of bad paths can double load time.

Host files locally – this may require more bandwidth, but you’ll gain a lot of speed by not having to go out into the web to find the image. Quit using services like Flickr to host your images – put them on your own server since local files nearly always load faster than external files.

Correctly tag images with height and width tags to see a huge difference when the web browser loads the page. If the browser reads the width and height of the tag, it can blow right past the image and let it load in the background while it renders the rest of the page.

Reduce widgets – they can keep your site from loading properly. Also, use static caching – web servers are good at serving static files. Make your dynamic pages into static pages, and reduce load on your server. This will greatly improve load time for crucial pages.

Use a service such as CSS clean to take your CSS source and strip out white spaces, line breaks, unnecessary characters, etc.

These tips will help you shorten load times, and since Google is floating the idea of taking page load time into account for rankings as well as AdWords Quality Scores, it is a good idea to start working on it now.

Google has a complex set of rules governing cost of Adwords ads and where you appear in the results. They also have a new tool, designed to make bidding more scientific and less of a gamble.

Many advertisers have gone into penny-pinching mode during this recession. AdWords is still a good option for your site, but you have to bid smart! The new “first page bid” notation in AdWords for lower-position keywords suggests how high you should bid to stay on the first page of SERP’s- is it accurate, or a gambit to get higher bids out of advertisers?

How low can you bid on a keyword while maintaining a decent ad position? Finally, there’s a tool that might help. Google’s new bid simulator tool is designed to provide relevant information that indirectly answers the question for you.

The tool also provides extra data in graphical form to help you figure out how much extra it’s going to cost to make a significant jump in ad position.If it costs you $4.52 on average to stay in ad position 4, the estimator will show you lists of projected impressions at various price points above your current rate. If you see a significant increase in impressions at the rate of $7.20, it might be worth your while to bump up a notch to placement 3 or 2. .However, if a jump in clicks or impressions only appears around $15.00. it might not be worth the extra moolah.

The Google tool projections are based on the last 7 days’ worth of data for your chosen keyword. The projection is fairly accurate, though not guaranteed, and the pricing curve can be steep!

The bid simulator can save you a lot of time, letting you tweak over time to see how much money you need to be bidding. Just go up or down slightly; you can change your bid instantly while viewing the graph, making subtle or dramatic changes in your strategy in real time. Entering your own bid opens up the possibility of more gradual bid moves. With the bid simulator tool, you may be able to save time in testing, as you can more closely gauge the possible effect each change has.

With Google updating and expanding features for Google Base, you want to be aware how it works. Here’s some snippets from an earlier post, way back in September of last year:

 At first glance, Google Base looks like a addendum to Google for the purpose of basically flea-marketing your unwanted goods, but no – you can post PDF files, articles, etcetera – all with links back to your url.

The key is attributing, which is pretty much like tagging in the sense that certain things begin to be grouped and categorized by how well you tag. I have got to try this out and see if it makes a difference. I can’t help but wonder, if Google displays these on Product Search or their general search engine, what criteria do they use, and why?

Google does make a point of saying your product or items may appear on Google main web search, and upon further investigation, Google Base may have some merit all of its own just as a product search. A notation reads that ‘you don’t have to have a website to use Google Base – just a Google account (of course). Anything you submit to Google base without a url will be hosted on a special url.

Now it appears those who use Google Base will be getting teh chance to explor rextra ad opportunities in the near future, and that an RSS fee is the key to making sure you get to take advantage of this novelty – just make sure you use the attributing factor wisely as it is the only way to get keywords in for search queries!

Read more about the new stuff coming to Google Base on our news blog.

In the last post we saw how AJAX can impede our SEO results. In this post let us consider how PHP pages can hinder our SEO efforts. When compared to HTML pages, PHP poses special challenges to the SEO professionals. However this is not to say that PHP pages cannot be optimized effectively. We an indeed optimize PHP pages to get good search engine ranking.

One of the major factors that hinder SEO is the page loading time. When the search engine spiders access your website and if your web pages take too long to load because of the server response time, then you will not be able to get the best out of indexing. Spiders will indeed mark your website as unresponsive website. Why do PHP pages take longer to respond because it has to communicate to the database stored in the server. The database and the loop code affect the page’s response time. Though AJAX pages over come the server time delays using an intermediary engine, search bots cannot read Java Script. So we need to use a different technique to optimize our pages. One of the ways recommended to reduce the page’s response time is to avoid the SELECT calls. In place of SELECT calls, it is recommended that we use the names of the columns that we would like to retrieve. Further more we need to use duplicated codes instead of entering into loops that are of repetitive nature. Though loops make PHP coding easier and effective, it is not good for SEO. So in your coding try to avoid coding style that will throw the search engine bots into loops.

The second factor that you need to take into consideration is to the URL. Your URL should be crawlable. The trick here is to make your PHP pages behave like HTML pages. Normally it is done using Apache server calls. This will work if you have a large site and create duplicate URLs that imitate static URLs. You may have to use a different strategy if your website is a small website. Number of SEO professionals try to minimize the usage of GET variables. Never take chances here; faking URLs should be done carefully by experienced programmers to ensure that you server unique pages when the URLs are unique.

It is a known fact that PHP pages add session id numbers to the links if your browser should reject cookies. One of the ways of dealing with this problem is to disable the entire trans-id component.

These are just a few tweaks that you can do to your PHP pages. It is best to hire experienced programmers that are conversant with the principles of SEO. On the whole optimizing PHP pages is not as simple as optimizing HTML pages. Make sure you have the right resources at hand when you decide to go PHP.

 Subscribe in a reader

• Email Subscription by Feedburner