Website Design & SEO Tips

Check your Google Pagerank here.

Matt  Cutts has indicated that the speed with which your website loads is going to be increasingly important and if you use webmaster tools you will see in the labs section an option on website performance.  The fact that Google have added this section to their webmaster tools does seem to support the idea that website load speed is going to be increasingly important in search position.

Google Labs

If you look at this section you will see a graph showing where your website comes in terms of loading speed compared to other websites.  The graph shows the 20th percentile ie the region within which the fastest 20% of websites fall.  Ideally you want your website’s performance to be as close as possible to that section of the graph.

Website Performance

Under the graph you will see a list of your slowest urls with the average speed of download, bear in mind this will be over a range of servers and internet connections.  Additionally there is a list of pages with suggestions as to how you could speed the pages up, most often by using gzip compression.

Average Load Speed

On the face of it this seems like a good move as nothing is more irritating than clicking through from a search onto a website that takes an age to load and locks your browser up, however there are much wider implications which may not be good.  Many people have websites on servers over which they have no control and depending on their configuration these servers may run very slowly.  The result is then that either your website suffers in searches or you have to move to faster more efficient servers which doubtlessly will be more costly and I can hear them hiking the prices up as I write!  One possible consequence of this is that search engine results will over time be predominantly populated by only large businesses pushing the SME businesses out the bottom of the search results.

Another implication is for media based websites who use video clips etc as these always take a while to load and even I here in the UK find pages with videos a nightmare as I work with an internet connection via a mobile dongle.  Your market may not involve countries outside the UK however your average website load speed will be calculated from everyone who tries to access your website whether they are in China, Russia, USA wherever and some of these countries have considerably less efficient broadband connections than the UK.  So your website speed will be judged by download speeds in countries who are not relevant to your market.

There are many implications of deciding search position on website download speed and it will be interesting to see how this pans out over time.

Since Matt Cutts joined Google it has been far easier to find out what is going on at Google.  He regularly writes at the Google Blog and does occassionally respond to the comments although I do get the impression a lot of people would prefer he responded a little more often.

The best place however to keep in contact is on twitter where he is @mattcutts.  If you follow Google’s Matt Cutts on Twitter you will keep up to date with new developments and once in a while he will respond to personal messages as we found out last week when he confirmed to us at S3 Web Design that old fashioned link building is no longer the way forward and that only honestly earned human votes for your website are worthwhile ie individual links from websites that like your website not bought in hundreds of links from irrelevant websites.

Follow @mattcutts on twitter to hear the latest Google news.

On saturday I exchanged twitters with Matt Cutts of Google.

twitter exchange with matt cutts

You will see that when I said that Google is moving towards honesty ie not artificially gained links, he agreed.  This makes me happy as I think the only links that are important are those made by other humans who look at what you have to offer on you website and think right I like this and I want visitors to my website to see this useful information.

I will be very glad to see the linkbuilders gone, the ones that promise you links to high ranking sites.  That is artificial and it looks like Google are taking this into account in search engine results.

This phrase “search engine friendly URLs” means a number of things.  The most common meaning refers to changing URLs with parameters eg page addresses with ?id= type things in them, into /folder/pages etc.

In addition it means constructing your website so that the paths to your pages use keywords, for example to use the example I have just given – the word “folder” is probably not a keyword for your website, so instead call the folder in which the page pages is kept something relevant like “products” and, of course call the page a sensible name like “green-widget.php” or whatever is appropriate!

Now to follow on from this I tried out an experiment where I took the process a little further.  A few weeks ago I set up my new SEO website www.seo4all.co.uk and looked at some of the phrases people put into Google to find SEO Specialists but knowing that most of us are not nerdy types I focused on the simple questions you and I put into search boxes and found that “how do I SEO my website” and “seo my website” were quite often entered in the search box.  You can tell this because as you type into the box Google will provide a drop down of suggested searches which are based on past history of searches.  You try it, it works! 

So as a result of this very basic research I called one of the pages on my website ”SEO My Website” including putting that as the menu option. 

Having only set www.seo4all.co.uk up a few weeks ago I found when searched today in Google for SEO MY WEBSITE  my website SEO4all came up on the first page out of 38million results, and in a UK only search my website came second in the search engine results.  So page titles and keyword URLs do indeed make a difference.

If you read my blog then you will know that the Duracell Bunnies advert is my current favourite.  I added this important fact to my blog just for fun about a week or so ago.  If you now search for duracell bunnies advert in Google you will see we come up half way down the second page for the whole web.  Now over time this result will sink down the results as the Google algorith will take into account relevance and traffic and as obviously this blog is not devoted to the topic of duracell bunnies this website will be seen as less relevant and therefore will move down the search engine results.

This is a simple example of how changing the content on an indexed website can bring you into the search engine results quite quickly, however you will only maintain your position by keeping your content surrent and relevant ie in this case I would have to keep adding content to this website on the same or similar topic on a regular basis.  So regularly adding more content containing your keywords helps your search engine position.