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Marketing -
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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Written by Brian Johnson
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Tuesday, 10 February 2009 20:56 |
BEFORE LAUNCH 1) Make Sure Your Site Runs Fast What we’re going to do: Make sure your site runs as fast as it possibly can. Why we’re doing it: Imagine clicking on a search result from Google and ending up waiting 15 seconds for the page to load. It rarely happens. Google promotes sites that run quickly and are easy for users Google is keeping track of how fast your pages load. Heres how to find those stats: · Login at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview· Choose one domain to examine· Click "Crawl Rate" under the "Diagnostic Tab"· Click on the section called "Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)" Under there you'll find a graph of when your server has been operating particularly quickly and when its been slow. Especially on shared hosting, having a lot of visitors in a short space of time is likely to slow down your site. Sites on dedicated servers are much less likely to have these problems. Our most popular blog posts cause pages to load in nearly 4 seconds instead of just 0.1 or 0.2 seconds. Why does this matter? Well, Search Engine love sites with high "usability" and a site that takes 10 seconds to load each page is not going to be in their good books. This site has a good rundown of server times and why they matter. In brief: · 0.1seconds is ideal· 1 second is about the maximum acceptable time· Over 1 second on a regular basis and you really need to optimize your site How we do it: We test and find out what parts of your site are slowing it down. My favorite tool for this is the OctaGate SiteTimer: http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/ Check out this analysis of http://bbc.co.uk from Octagate. A quick look can show you that some files take a long time to load: The BBC really needs to work on making sure that those long yellow bars are made much shorter. When you find long bars like this on your site, try and remove them: Photos – if a photo is loading slowly, try to make it smaller or of less quality.Scripts – work out if they are really necessary. Most users would prefer a fast site over one with a pretty photo effect that took much longer to load. If its your site itself that is loading slowly, you need to look at your hosting.Further Reading:· http://sitescore.silktide.com/· http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ 2) Set Up an External Statistics Package What we’re going to do:Make sure your can collect plenty of statistics about your visitors without slowing down your site. Why we’re doing it:Recently a new client complained to us that their site was always running slow and timing out. The problem got so bad that they asked us to move it from their hosting company to ours in the hope that things would improve. There was one key problem - it had had a Joomla statistics component running inside it for over a year. The database was, without exaggeration, about twenty-five times the normal size of a Joomla database. It took several minutes to download the tables from PHPMyAdmin and then the fun was just beginning. Actually trying to upload such a huge file left the server hanging every time. The only way to upload the database was to edit it into small sections and run the queries section by section. I can't guarantee that 100% of the website's speed problems had been caused by the statistics component but the extra database tables were so large and cumbersome that they undoubtedly caused some drag on the site. The statistics collected by the component were reasonably useful, particularly when it came to tracking the actions of individual users, but that benefit was more than outweighed by the performance problems it caused. How we do it:1) Turn off Joomla's default statistics package except for "Log Search Strings" (its useful to know what people are searching for).2) Don't use JoomlaStats, BSQ Sitestats or anything else inside of Joomla. Let someone elses' servers store your mountains of data.3) Sign up for Google Analytics. Open up the index.php file for your template (or and put the code at the bottom of your template, above 4) Use a hosting company that utilizes CPanel and AWStats. Old and somewhat ugly, AWStats is still a great source of data.
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Search Engine IQ! 
