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    • Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings

    November 13th, 2009

    Long Post Alert

    This turned into a rather long post, so it’s probably a good thing I did it on a Friday.
    However, this is a very important issue, so set aside some time to read through the whole thing.

    I was reading a summary of topics that were presented at PubCon written by Rand Fishkin over at SEOMOz. One in particular caught my eye as I have been giving this very advice to clients for most of 2009: “Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings.”

    It makes sense, doesn’t it? Google’s success is based on focusing on three key areas: user experience, monetization, and branding. Often, these principles may seem to be at odds, but it is the struggle that produces innovation. A tripod couldn’t stand if the legs weren’t pushing against each other right?

    In this case, Google is focusing on user experience to feed branding, and may be sacrificing short-term revenue. In this case they may giving less focus to websites showing their content network ads and greater focus to established businesses that can afford to concentrate on optimizing load times.

    The Most Important Issue in Load Times

    One of my favorite anecdotes from my web career comes from a few years back when I was interviewing for a graphic designer position. A well-meaning fellow came to us with experience in ColdFusion and PaintShopPro (we were a .Net and Illustrator department at the time).

    After running through our list of general questions we started asking the more existential ones, like “What is the most challenging thing you’ve ever had to do for a client?” The answer we got is hilarious to me, even today.

    After a short explanation that “the web” ran on connections between machines, he launched into a short dissertation on the hex-code color system. Eventually we learned that, in his view, optimizing load times was best accomplished by taking a color which was used throughout the website (say “purple”) and gently dialing the hex codes closer to white, each time saving himself a bit of bandwidth usage (in theory).

    Not only does this not make any sense from a design standpoint, it’s also fundamentally flawed from a tech-standpoint as well. But it does illustrate the desperation which plagues some designers in reducing their memory footprint.

    Unfortunately, in the modern search landscape, kb-size means less and less. When you consider the cost of bandwidth (especially from Google’s perspective, who is amassing one of the largest fiber-optics collections in the world) the difference between downloading a 500kb page and a 5kb page is so small that it doesn’t matter, let alone the difference between 20kb and 18kb.

    The most notorious factor now affecting this aspect of search rankings is one level deeper: it’s your server.

    An Example of Server Response vs. Rankings

    In 2008 I acquired a domain which had been abandoned by its previous owner. I set up a blog on that domain which stuck with the topics of the previous owner, and put in place a system which gave me 100s of pages of new content each week. By the end of 2008 the site was approximately 6,000 pages large, but with only a couple hundred pages actually indexed by Google.

    During that time, the site was hosted on a shared platform. With approximately 3,000 other websites on the server, the load would sometimes spike to levels where the site was inaccessible, at least by the standards of the modern user.

    As You Can See…

    It’s almost a misnomer to say that your search rankings are positively influenced by load times. If anything, your rankings are negatively influenced, and anyone who doesn’t optimize their webserver is leaving money on the table.

    I don’t have the exact numbers, but I would guess from experience that the site probably only had an 85% uptime (determined by pinging the site in 15 minute intervals). In March of 2009, I moved the site to a dedicated server.

    The Not-so-Instantaneous Effects

    When the site was re-launched on the dedicated server, I noticed an uptick in the number of pages indexed for the rest of March. Looking back, I would guess that these pages were considered “questionable” by the GoogleBot due to their unpredictable load times, and were suddenly being served very close to 100% of the time.

    For the next month or so, nothing much happened. I believe Google was giving the site some time, the change in IP address probably tripped something on their end to wait and see what else happened.

    Around May the site picked up momentum in leaps and bounds. In the space of a month I watched the number of pages indexed at Google jump from just under 1,000 all the way to the low 6,000s by the end of June. The site now stands at just over 14,000 pages indexed, which is roughly 75% of the total pages available.

    Traffic similarly skyrocketed, from around 12,000 pageviews early in the year to a record 182,000 pageviews in August.

    Caveats

    Of course, it’s difficult to isolate the compounding variables in any SEO experiment, especially when you don’t know you’re experimenting in the first place.

    There are a number of other factors that could have influenced the growth of this particular site: the fact that it now has a dedicated IP, or, since it is a blog, additional links in to popular posts. But I believe the predominant factor is the increased uptime.

    Checking Server Response, and Why Load Time isn’t the Whole Game

    There are many services out there that can help you monitor server performance, one of the most famous is PingDom. I’ve also used BasicState, which is a free service that sends you alerts and summaries when your server is unreachable.

    It’s important to see how often your server is unreachable, not just how long it takes to load a page. You have to remember that for all the collective intelligence at Google, the menial tasks are still performed by robots.

    Let’s say your site has 1,000 links coming in to it from other sites. And let’s pretend Googlebots follow those links at a rate of 10 per day, and that any given Googlebot will wait 10 seconds for your page to load before reporting that the site is gone and moving on. For simplicity’s sake, let’s also assume that all Googlebots communicate back to an Aggregator of some kind which stores data about your website.

    On Day One, 10 Googlebots come by (or the same Googlebot 10 times, however you prefer to think of it). Your server is only capable of responding 8/10 times. Maybe one time it didn’t respond within 10 seconds, and one time it was actually down.

    Remember, Googlebot is stupid. In the first case, Googlebot calls Aggregator and says, “The site is slow,”. In the second case, where the site is giving him a 404 error, he reads it as “Not Found” and decides the page is gone. He calls Aggregator and says “I got to this page via a link from someothersite.com and the page is gone.”

    Aggregator sits back and watches this happen for 10 days. At the end of that cycle, he finds that Googlebot has reported 100 broken links (because the site was down when it got there) and 10% of the time the page did not load within the allotted time.

    Aggregator compares this information to the limits set by Google Engineers, and data collected from other websites of this type. He then removes 100 links from your site’s profile (they go to “Not found” pages right?), and then places the site further down in the results, beneath websites that are better at responding to users.

    The Bottom Line

    The bottom line is that your website is an investment. If it’s worth it for you to spend time and money on an SEO strategy, then it’s worth your time and money to make sure you’re running on a strong server.

    All too often, I see people get started by having their nephew build them a website. Eventually they realize they need to upgrade and hire a competent web-dev. Next they know they want more people on the page so they hire an SEO, who tweaks titles and builds links.

    Nowhere in that entire chain did anyone think to upgrade the server. Servers are thought to be an issue for IT and Security, not Marketing. But in the world of Web Marketing, the underlying structure is just as important as the message.

    To put it another way: would you print your next direct mail piece on the inkjet in the office? Or have it printed in full color on glossy cardstock?

    Tags for This Post: google results, server, Post, Long, google, seo, Alert, response time, search engine robots

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    Posted in Building Momentum, Laying the Groundwork, Organic Placement (SEO), Strategy | 1 Comment »

    What’s in a Name?

    October 12th, 2009

    One example of the wild image search that is 'untouchable.'Once hearing about the name, people very often ask, “Why ‘Untouchable’?” To be fair, this typically comes from non-business owners. The general populace seems to think that company monikers are something like boat names: they should be clever and personal to the owner.

    Professionalism First

    The first “company” I started (when I was 13) was called Bell Enterprises. One of the first things I learned when I got into the real world of business is that almost any company that ends in ‘Enterprises’ is a joke.

    Playboy Enterprises and Cox Enterprises are the two exceptions I can think of. If you need proof, just recall that Cosmo Kramer’s company was named “Kramerica Enterprises.”

    Professional companies have one or two word names, and end in LLC or Inc. or they stand on their own because they’re publicly traded (like Google, Microsoft, and Apple).

    SEO Value

    The modern equivalent of naming your company ‘ACME Dentistry’ or ‘Aardvark Used Cars’ is choosing a business name with search keywords baked in. Of course, SEO and PPC Consultants, LLC is a bit obvious (and probably, sadly, registered), but getting the word ‘Marketing’ in the name is important.

    Domain Games

    Here are two domain-name tips for budding business owners:

    1. Try to get your exact business name with a .com extension. There is nothing more frustrating than typing in what I think should be your address and not finding you (I’m looking at you, Sunflower Markets).

    2. If you are open to suggestions on your business name, go check out auction sites like DomainsWithBenefits.com to see if someone may have previously registered a name you like and then failed to renew it. Getting a domain with history, links and maybe even PageRank gives you a big headstart on search rankings.

    The Untouchable Choice

    Taking the above into account, I narrowed the choice down to two names. Despite the other domain having history to it, I eventually chose ‘Untouchable’ for a couple reasons:

    1. ‘Untouchable’ pretty well describes the kind of marketing we do. Traditional marketing has a tactile element: postcards, coupons, mailers, flyers, phone directories, etc. The internet is somewhat “untouchable” by nature.
    2. In Feudal Japan the ‘untouchables’ were a caste typically associated with “dirty jobs”. Although most people would view this as a negative connotation, I prefer to concentrate on the noble work ethic associated with those people.
    3. In modern parlance, ‘untouchable’ is often viewed as a positive quality, as in:
      • Out of reach; unobtainable;
      • beyond criticism, control, or suspicion;
      • a person who is beyond reproach as to honesty, diligence, etc.;
      • a person or thing considered inviolable;

    So wouldn’t you want your internet marketing to be UntouchableMarketing?

    Tags for This Post: word marketing, domain games, cox enterprises, naming your company, cosmo kramer, exact business, choosing a business name, word names, playboy enterprises

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    Posted in Business, Laying the Groundwork | No Comments »

    Directory Submission: An Inadvertent Case Study

    April 18th, 2008

    Directory SubmissionThe arguments against bulk submission of your website to hundreds of general directories can be summarized in the following way:

    1. Search engines will frown upon you getting 1,000 new links in one day.
    2. The value of 1,000 directory links from general-topic sites is next to nothing.
    3. Topical directories that are hand-edited will provide much more link-value, so you should spend resources on that instead.

    I’d like to use an opportunity (or “crisi-tunity” if you’re a Simpsons fan) that’s recently come up for me to refute some of these claims. But first, let me refute #1 right away…

    Rate of Change
    When search engine spiders visit your webpage, there is a certain process that occurs. The spider reads the HTML of the page, probably makes a few statistical notes (# of words, # of links (internal and external), URL parameters used, dates on the page, etc.) and then puts it in the queue for analysis by a heavier-duty piece of software.

    Your site gets put in the queue to be spidered in a few different ways: someone with a search-engine toolbar visits your site, someone links to your site, someone does a search for your specific URL. All of which give the site a different priority, depending on whether or not it’s in the index. Statistically speaking, this means that your site and my site are almost never being spidered simultaneously.

    When you add in the fact that your page can’t be indexed until it goes through the indexing algorithSimpsons fanm (the heavy-duty software I referenced above) which can take a couple days, there is just no way for your new pages and mine to be added to the index at the same time.

    Because links are an element of the page, they are “counted” in the same manner. When you spread this example across 1,000 sites, all with different indexing periods and rates there is just no way for a search engine to “see” you receiving hundred of links at the same time. They will appear to trickle in over the course of several weeks or months, especially when you consider the fact that not all the approvals go through at once either. I run several directories, and I only approve submissions once or twice a week.

    There, #1 is officially dead, no?

    The meat and potatoes
    Last year a friend of mine was designing a brand new website for a company that sold promotional items. They were starting off with a brand new domain and wanted to get search engine traffic right away. Although my buddy asked me if I would help out, at the time I was confined by an agreement to only perform SEO for one company. So instead I hooked him up with a few tips on on-page optimization and a vendor who does directory submission.

    Long story short the company ended up bailing on my friend after he delivered the site. They never paid him, so all that happened was the new site was built and live with on-page SEO basics, and it was submitted to 1,000 general-topic directories. One year later, the company has basically dissolved, but their site still stands (along with some analytics code I told my buddy to put on the site). Here’s what has materialized:

    • The site now has a pagerank of 4 (from N/A at the start).
    • The site shows 553 backlinks in Yahoo.
    • The site is receiving about 20 visitors a day from Google.

    So it seems that those links are neither worthless nor ignored. They have produced tangible results in 2 major search engines. Granted, this won’t make you a million dollars, but for a $50 “fire-and-forget” submission package, why wouldn’t you?

    What I Advocate and Response to #3
    With regard to topical web directories and finding the really strong ones to submit to, I fully encourage you to take advantage. There will never, ever be anything wrong with achieving a high-quality link, from a site that is topically-related to yours.

    However, if you have a brand new site where you’re just trying to get some “air under the wings” (or you’re running an Advanced Domaining Strategy) why not spend a little cash to get things moving? You can (and should) always supplement this with topical link-building, but that kind of strategy means you need to know your business, which is something you (conceivably) can’t outsource.

    So spend your time building quality links, and outsource the foundational stuff.

    Tags for This Post: directories, link building, directory, , seo

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    Posted in Building Momentum, Laying the Groundwork, Organic Placement (SEO) | Comments Off

    Laying the Groundwork for a Successful Site: Part 1

    November 9th, 2006

    You’ve just completed your site. You have a unique offering to the public, but how are you going to get the word out?

    If you’re going to get the maximum benefit from your future SEO activity you need to lay the proper foundation. Step one in the process is getting the proper URL structure set up.

    The first decision you need to make is to decide whether you want your site to appear as www.mysite.com or just mysite.com in search results. There isn’t necessarily a difference, and it’s a matter of personal choice.

    One factor that might help you make your decision is that less computer-savvy folks might be more inclined to add the www. before your address, whereas “techie” types will be more likely to use just mysite.com.

    If your website is hosted on an Apache server, you can add this code to your .htaccess file:

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}  !^www.example.net$       [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)         http://www.example.net/$1  [L,R]

    For an IIS server (with isapi_rewrite), you can use the following code:

    Add this to your httpd.ini file:

    RewriteCond Host: ^mysite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mysite.com$1 [I,RP]

    If you want to rewrite your URL to the non-www version your Apache code would like:

    RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

    Next up, creating the proper URL structure for your navigation.

    Tags for This Post: www version, maximum benefit, proper foundation, rewriterule, techie types, www mysite com, savvy folks

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    Posted in Laying the Groundwork, Organic Placement (SEO), Sponsored Placement (PPC) | No Comments »