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Website Speed is now a Ranking Factor

March 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

website speedJust wanted to jot down a quick blog post with my thoughts about two blog posts about speed. Matt Cutts has been writing both on his own blog and on the official Google Webmaster Central Blogto tell everyone what we knew was coming: site speed is now an official ranking factor.

Now I want to remind you that I’ve been writing about site speed for quite a while. I wrote about WordPress template optimization (a quite dated post now, btw) back in january 2008. And even in april 2007 I wrote about the effect a slow server could have on how Google spiders your site.

Now of course I do a weekly WordPress podcast together with Frederick Townes, who is the creator of the awesome plugin W3 Total Cache, so I talk about speed a lot, and I’ve talked more than once about getting proper WordPress hosting. And that is leading to what I wanted to tell you in this post: the fact that Google now officially has made site speed one of the (over 200) ranking factors, means that there can be no more excuses; you have to get proper hosting. Now.

Having said that, I should probably tell you that I recently switched to an even better CDN, which has made my site even faster. I’m now on MaxCDN, as well as still being hosted on a VPS.net VPS itself. My site now loads, depending on where you are in the world, in somewhere between 1 and 2,5 seconds. Am I finished? Of course not, there’s always room for improvement. Has this speed helped my rankings? Probably. I do know one thing: I’ve had several clients whose sites were too slow, and who, after being properly optimized for speed, got better rankings.

And heck, if it’s a ranking factor, this is one of the easiest ones to get right. There can be no discussion about it: 10 seconds is slow, 1 second is fast. Of course there’s grey areas, but why settle when your site is still loading in more than say 2 seconds? There are several pieces of research that show that decreasing load times on pages leads to an increase in sales, pageviews and other desired actions. Of course it does. A fast site is nicer to hang around on. Nicer to purchase stuff on. Nicer to subscribe to. In short: a faster site is more likely to make you money.

Do I need to say it again? Make your site load as fast as you can. Install W3 Total Cache if you’re on WordPress and you haven’t done it yet. Get proper hosting if it’s still slow after that (test with Pingdom, f/i), and yes, I urge you to try VPS.net in that case. Go do it. Now!!! Article source: yoast.com

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18 Million WordPress Websites Now Available in iPad Format

February 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

WordPress.com blog owners, rejoice! All of the hosting site’s 18 million blogs are available now in an iPad-friendly interface, complete with touch interactions and easy customization.

Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com, just flipped the switch on a new feature that transforms WordPress.com blogs into app-like destinations optimized for tablets. The company says it worked closely with NYC-based startup Onswipe to to create a whole new blog consumption experience for the iPad. Onswipe provides publishers with simple tools to create tablet-optimized websites.

“Our iPad-optimized view is app-like in its functionality, but pure HTML5 goodness on the backend,” said WordPress’s Nick Momrik in a blog post announcing the new feature. “It supports touch interactions, swiping, rotation and many other features of the iPad.”

The iPad-optimized blogs have a module interface, making it easy for publishers to switch up the look and feel of their websites. The WordPress.com Dashboard now includes options to change fonts, create personalized covers and change skins. The iPad optimization feature is also available as a WordPress plugin for anybody who runs a self-hosted WordPress.org blog.

“The iPad provides a ton of new opportunities for readers to experience the web and focus in on what matters: the content itself, while making use of what’s possible now with swipe gestures,” Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told Mashable. “Automattic powers over 18 million sites and believes in the open web, so it was a great place to start showing the benefit of the web over native apps.”

What do you think of the new iPad-optimized websites? Do you intend to create a tablet version of your WordPress blog? Let us know in the comments.

Article source: mashable.com

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Search and Social – you can’t get the cream out of the coffee

January 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

On the 10th January 2012, Google launched “Search plus your World“, intermixing search and social and providing even more “personalized” results. There’s a lot of outcry about some parts of this, with people saying they don’t want “personalized” results. I actually think that normal users do want personalized results and that this is, for the most part, a good thing.

There’s been some outcry though, because Twitter and Facebook aren’t “highlighted” as much as Google+ in those new social results. Danny is doing some awesome reporting on this, first in “Search Engines Should Be Like Santa From “Miracle On 34th Street”“, later in an interview with Schmidt.

Google used to have access to the Twitter firehose, all the tweets coming in in realtime, enabling them to index tweets at light speed. Facebook used to show some friends of a person on a profile to visitors to that profile who aren’t logged in, now look at the cache for my Facebook profile: just other people with the same name.

As I said in a reaction to a Google+ post by Jeff Jarvis: what both Twitter and Facebook are afraid of is that they’re “giving” “their” social graph to Google, thereby allowing Google to easily grow its own social network because it would make it very easy for Google to suggest friends to you or say “these friends of yours already use Google+, shouldn’t you use it too?”. So by opening up, they’d open their books to a competitor.

This, ultimately, should be a users choice, not a platform choice. When it does become a user choice, of course Google should favor the social network the user is the most active on, so if I’m more active on Facebook than on Twitter or Google+, it should highlight that above the others. Right now, it seems to be mostly highlighting Google+, which will raise some eyebrows here and there and is food for discussion.

A while back at the first Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels, Bas van den Beld of State of Search interviewed Olivier Blanchard and myself about search and social. We talked about how the two intertwine and can’t be unraveled, in fact, as Olivier said during the interview: “it’s like coffee and cream, once they mix you can’t get the cream out of the coffee”. See the interview here (the sound is not the best ever, I know):

The thing is: this is a done deal. There’s no way back. Search and social have now officially teamed up, so you might as well live with it. It also means that not using Google+ is… Not really an option if you’re a marketer, but I guess we had that one coming for a while as well.

So, what does this mean from a tactics perspective? For now, it means: share every post on Google+ too, make sure you have Google+ buttons on your posts and, most importantly: keep building relations with people! It’s not like that much changed; social mentions might have become a new and maybe even important ranking factor, but even quality links are usually the result of a relation, of social interaction.

The formula to success didn’t change: you have to keep building relations / followers / an audience, create great content and make sure people notice it. Article source: yoast.com

Filed Under: Blog, SEO, Social Media Tagged With: ,

The future of the QR codes for Small Business

January 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Over the past 18-24 months, the acceptance and use of Quick Response (QR) codes has steadily increased among marketing and creative professionals, as well as individual and business consumers, but the question remains, what’s the future of QR codes? Will the future show that QR codes were just a passing advertising fad — here today, gone tomorrow? Or, will the future show that QR codes were a viable direct response mechanism that marketers can use to engage and interact with a target audience on a permission-based, personal level?

As a marketing strategist, my answer to the question “what’s the future of QR codes” is probably much different than how a technologist, developer, creative professional, or futurist might respond, but I believe it is justified and has merit. Ask the question to this group and they might all begin to talk about the next version of QR code technology (e.g., QR code 3.0) and what that might be like and how that might work, or they might talk about other technologies — such as near field communication (NFC), augmented reality, digital watermarks, or image recognition — and how technologies such as these will be the death knell for QR codes, let alone other 2D bar-code types. But, if the question is asked of me, I believe the future of QR codes really lies in the response companies may give when they themselves are asked, “What are your future strategic marketing goals and objectives?” Probably not what you were expecting to hear was it? Please allow me to explain.

First, let me give you my definition of a QR code. A QR code is a tactical direct response mechanism used in marketing, advertising, and promotion which, upon scanning, enables consumers to bridge the gap between the physical and print world and the digital world and back again. By nature of the technology, QR codes provide for a relatively instantaneous interactive experience between a consumer and a product, service and, brand. The key to enabling the use of QR codes, by an advertiser or a consumer, is a smart-phone installed with a QR code reader app. Please read that last line again and keep it in mind as you read the remainder of the article.

When companies begin to consider the use of QR codes for advertising, promotion, or general business purposes, the majority seem to ask the same simple question: Do we want to use QR codes or not in our next campaign? But the real question to be asked is, “As a company, do we want to advance and enhance our integrated marketing strategy, as well as the goals and objectives which go along with it, to the point that the strategy includes an investment in and commitment to a mobile channel or platform?” If the answer from one company to the next is “yes,” then QR codes will have a future. If the answer from one company to the next is “no” then QR codes won’t have much of a future. Because QR code technology is based on a mobile platform and the use of smartphones (see definition above), it is essential for companies to first understand, believe in, embrace, and make use of a mobile strategy, before they try to understand, believe in, embrace, and make use of QR codes on a tactical level. Think strategic before tactical — it’s that simple. Article source: imediaconnection

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