18 Dec

Page Load Speed Part of Google’s Algorithm

Following on from our post the other day (SwiftRank By Optimizing Page Speed) I was looking for more information on this. I found one post from Search Engine Land Site Speed, Google’s Next Ranking Factor which indicates that page load times will be a factor in the algorithm next year.

This makes sense from a user perspective. I have been advocating for a long time keeping the weight of your home page as low as possible, and have always recommended having less than 1MB in total downloads for the home page. This total number includes not only the page source, but also images, CSS, JS, and any other file that might be downloaded by the home page.… Read the rest

12 Sep

Search Engine Strategies in New York City

The next Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference to be held in New York City will occur on March 22 through 26 2010.  SES is one of the leading global conference and expositions educating in the fields of search engine optimization and search engine marketing.   There will also be a series of SES Search Marketing Events which will provide instruction from some of the industry’s leading lights and search engine representatives.  When in New York stay at some of the best New York hotels including the Hotel Gansevoort in the Meat Packing district.… Read the rest

16 Jun

IIS Problem with Google Base XML Feed

Just ran into a really odd problem with a client using Microsoft IIS to produce a Google Base XML feed. After a number of years with the feed working fine it seems that a little while back the feed stopped working for no obvious reason. The application was written in C# reading a SQL Server database and outputting a XML data stream that is then fetched by the Googlebase robot.

The problem symptoms were that the feed stopped outputting anything and the server closed the connection with the client.

I decided to update the application to use the XmlTextWriter class – perhaps IIS was changed to force the use of this new interface – but that didn’t help.… Read the rest

09 Jun

Issues Upgrading Google Adwords Editor

Adwords editor recently prompted me to upgrade so I did. Then the program stopped working and hasn’t worked in a week. I finally spent a few hours yesterday and today to troubleshoot the issue. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling. I tried uninstalling, cleaning the registry, and then reinstalling. Still no dice.

Finally I uninstalled and looked in the Google directory on my c: drive  C:\Program Files\Google\ and sure enough there was a ‘Google AdWords Editor’ directory full of files. When I deleted this folder and reinstalled again the program started working.… Read the rest

11 Mar

Robots.txt validator

Just added to our tools section the ability to validate your robots.txt file. There are tons of robots.txt validators available but this one is slightly different in that it looks at the file from an SEO perspective – looking to see if you’ve blocked too many pages from the spiders, whether there’a sn XML sitemap, etc. It validates not only the standard robots.txt syntax but also more modern additions that are not truely standardized yet, such as the commands ‘sitemap’, and ‘allow’.

Give it a try and let me know if the validator finds any errors in your robots.txt file.… Read the rest

14 Jan

SEO Site Review – http://www.silvaheeren.com

Daniel Silva asked me to comment on the SEOing of his site http://www.silvaheeren.com.

First impressions:

  • His home page is about his firm. Who cares? Remember the world’s favorite radio stations WII FM – what’s in it for me? I would totally swap the site around and put services first and foremost and the ‘about us’ page as a footer nav.
  • Light gray text on white background is difficult to read, give that more contrast.
  • Links into the content are grouped at the bottom and not in the text where you’d except.
  • Terms and conditions looks to be a contract – I would remove this as its irrelevant to someone visiting your site.
Read the rest
14 Aug

Return of Pages Indexed and Link Quality Tool

A popular tool on the old Eixir site was the pages indexed and link quality tool. When we changed sites we lost those tools but we have now recreated them with some more bells and whistles at http://www.semreportsonline.com/

This site is still in beta (or even alpha) but I wanted to open it up for people to play with and give feedback.

Main features:

  • Link quality assessment including graphs and history functionality
  • Pages indexed across all 3 major engines.
  • Ranking reports including capability to go back in time and compare ranking reports including how the top 30 looked at the time.
Read the rest
17 Jun

Why Do You Need SEO?

Web designers are expert at design. With that in mind most designers are not marketers and are unaware of the implications of online marketing. If you do not optimize your site it’s like designing a beautiful brochure and putting it in a drawer where no one can see it. Optimization opens your site up to search engine spiders and the people searching for your products and services.

Higher Rankings |Increased Traffic | More Sales

Internet marketing and search engine optimization are concerned with higher search engine rankings and increased traffic to your web site. If the traffic is targeted to your products and services it can increase your sales and business dramatically.… Read the rest