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In a world where more and more households are connected to the internet, bandwidth is becoming an issue and brownouts have been predicted to occur in the next few years. With the strain on the infrastructure of the internet this makes having an efficient, fast loading website all that much more important.
The bottom line for most site owners though, is not the efficiency of the internet as a whole, but rather the financial sustainability of their websites. While there are many ways to make a site perform better in terms of converting visitors, one of the simplest, and probably most important aspects is simply to reduce the load time of your website.
If your site suffers from poor performance you could be missing out not only on sales and average visitor time on site, but also search rankings. Below I will discuss some of the negative impacts a slow loading site may experience, as well as a few ways you can correct the issue. In some cases, correcting the problem will cost you only some time, although it has the potential to really pay off in the long run.
Negative Impacts of Long Load Times
If your site takes too long to load this can have a number of negative effects including loss of sales, loss or rankings, and increased pay per click cost. It can even increase your hosting costs depending on the cause.
Loss of Sales
Let's pretend for a moment that search engines just didn't exist and rankings didn't matter. People are impatient - if your site takes too long to load, many potential customers will simply give up and go elsewhere.
Broadband connections are growing incredibly fast in the US; however, according to a study posted at FoxNews this past July, approximately 10% of Americans still have dial-up internet access. If your site loads slowly, you may be alienating 10% of your potential customers.
The last thing you want to do is frustrate your visitors. If you do this, you may drive them away, never to return. If you can provide a fast loading efficient website, you will increase the likelihood that your visitors will make a purchase, and return again in the future.
Increased Pay per Click Costs
Only a few short months ago a post by Heather Lane at the Inside AdWords blog announced that landing page load times will affect a keyword's quality score. The reason for this is quite simple: a fast loading website improves the end user experience. As a result, ads directing to a slow loading page will be given a lower quality score. This in turn will cause your keyword bids to be higher, costing you significantly on a per click basis.
Loss of Organic Rankings
We know two things for a fact. Google factors in load times with AdWords, and Google focuses on an improved end user experience. As a result, I for one am convinced that a site's load time does impact overall organic search rankings. While this is likely only a small piece of the very large algorithmic puzzle, it does play a part, and if you can speed up your site, you just may be able to move your rankings up a notch or two.
Speeding up your site is unlikely to move your site from page 8 all the way to page 1, but it may be enough to move up a few positions.
Increased Hosting Costs
Assuming your load times are due to file size issues and not other server constraints, your hosting costs may be more than they need to be. This factor will vary a great deal based on the hosting company and the package you have chosen.
Many hosts now offer packages where a significant amount of bandwidth usage is included, resulting in a single flat monthly or annual rate. ( LunarPages for example, has a $4.95 monthly plan with unlimited bandwidth per month.) If your hosting provider does put a limit on usage and you are using beyond the allocated max, you could be paying a fair bit in overage charges. If you fall into this category, optimizing your files to reduce bandwidth usages could save you a considerable amount of cash.
Issues and Fixes
There are a number of issues that can cause a site to load slowly. Below I have noted a few items that are fairly common and can be relatively easily corrected.
Issue: Un-Optimized Images
This is probably one of the biggest culprits out there impacting load time today. I have seen countless websites where image optimization is simply not done, resulting in significantly increased page load times. One of the biggest problems is when images are scaled down to fit the application.
Quite often webmasters will take a large image, and scale it down using the height and width attributes rather than physically resizing the image. What this does is then require the browser to load the full high resolution image, when it really only needs a fraction.
Let's take this real world example. A client recently had a photo on their home page; the photo was 600 x 403 pixels, weighed in at 124.68 KB, and visually they had scaled the image to fit 473 x 317 pixels.
By resizing the original image to the desired dimensions, and then reducing the quality of the jpg to 70%, the end result was an image that looked identical on his website but weighed in at only 23 KB - that's 101.68 KB smaller than the original. Using a simple filesize download calculator I found online, 101.68 KB would take 14 seconds to download using a 56 Kb modem, or about 2 seconds on your run of the mill broadband connection.
For broadband users 2 seconds may not seem like much, but remember, this is only for a single image. When you add up all other images and on-site components, the time can significantly add up.
Issue: Un-Optimized files
Another way you can speed up your sites load time is to have clean HTML, CSS, and other included files. Remove extraneous code from your files, and use CSS wherever possible. Every piece of old html code adds up in size, even if it doesn't impact the visual site itself. I have seen many cases where links have been removed but the code remains accidently .
Audio and video can also be compressed. If your site uses a fair bit of multimedia, see if you can compress these files a bit more than you have already. You may be able to save some load time here as well without impacting user experience.
Issue: Hosting Server
It is possible that your site is perfect in every way, but the culprit is simply your web host. It does not necessarily mean that your host is slow, but if you are paying for an account on an old archaic computer with limited system resources servicing 1000 websites, this could seriously impact your site's load time. If you have worked to ensure that the site is well optimized for efficiency and the load times are still extreme, you may need to upgrade your hosting account to one more suited for your business needs.
If your site is a fairly basic, such as a static 8 page html site, then a slow server may have little to no impact, but if your site requires extensive database queries and the help of an intensive content management system, and serves up tens of thousands of visitors a day, then you may need to switch to a higher end dedicated server. If you have found that your server is the only problem in your slow load times, contact your host to see what they can do for you.
Issue: HTTP Requests
According to a post at the Yahoo Developer Blog , “80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, style sheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.”
The article discusses combining files in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests, largely by the use of CSS Sprites. They also discuss using image maps to combine multiple images, however, from an SEO perspective, this is not something that I would recommend as my experience has shown image-mapped links are not always followed by search engine spiders.
They go on to explain a vast number of rather technical aspects to speeding up a page. If you are a technical person capable of implementing advanced techniques, the Yahoo Developer Network is definitely something you should check out.
Load Time Tools
Before you undergo any changes to your site to resolve the slow load times, I suggest first finding a tool and benchmarking your progress. Record how long your site takes to load, and then try again after you have made an effort to correct the problem.
There are a number of tools out there that can help you calculate your load times. One such tool is WebSiteOptimization.com. This site specializes in optimizing the performance of your site in order to decrease bandwidth and load times. They have created a very simple tool which will give you the load times for the individual components of your site, which can give you a good idea where to start.
Summary
If you take a bit of time to speed up the load time for your website by optimizing your existing content and cleaning up your code, you may just find yourself making more sales. As an added bonus you may also find improved search engine rankings, which will then in turn increase your sales further. Depending on your hosting provider, you may even have a reduced monthly hosting bill. Decreasing the load time of your site is really win-win for everyone.
As the internet becomes more and more bandwidth intensive with an ever increasing stream of users and higher use applications, doing whatever we can do reduce the strain on the system will make for a faster internet for everyone. If every webpage on the internet could be reduced be even just 100 kb, the web would be a much faster place.
You've just launched your website, marking the end of a huge effort and the beginning of a whole new way of doing business. Now, all you have to do is sit back and wait for visitors to flood in, right?
But, wait, people have to know your site there in order to visit. So you go over to Google and search on your field to find your business. You don't see anything on the first few pages. Disappointing, but that's o.k. After all, your site's pretty new. Then you do a search on your company name, expecting to see your new site in the first position.
That's when the panic sets in…
Uh oh. Not only is your site not in the first slot, it's not even on the first page! For your own name! What's going on here? Did your designer do a bad job? Is your web host to blame? Why isn't it there yet???
Calm down!
Before you have to start breathing into a paper bag, realize that getting listed takes time. There are millions of websites out there with more uploaded every day. The search engines browse all these sites, adding them to their data banks, and updating their listings if the site already exists. But they can only get through so many sites in a day. It may take a while to locate and scan your new site.
So how can you shorten the time it takes to be listed in Google's results?
Unless you make it easier for search engines to find you, it may take time, even years for this to happen naturally. To speed the process, take the following actions. They're simple and well worth the effort.
1. Submit your site
Tell Google and the other search engines that you're there! Look for the “Submit Your Site” links on their sites and follow the instructions. Go to dmoz.org and list your site there. Though these aren't guaranteed ways to get listed, they're free, they only take a few minutes and every little bit helps.
2. Make sure your site's not an island
Search engines follow links to navigate around the Internet. If your site is not linked to other sites, you've greatly reduced the chance that a search engine will find it naturally. Make sure that other sites, business directories, article libraries, your clients, link to yours and you'll get found more quickly.
3. Break down and pay
Some engines, such as Yahoo, also have paid inclusion plans. For a fee, they'll visit your site immediately and list you promptly. If your business is a storefront, for example, depends on attracting visitors, you'll want to pay for a listing.
4. Establish your presence with a blog
The search engines love, love, love blogs. Blogs give them exactly what they want, which is new text-based information. If you start a blog that also links to your site, you'll be more likely to lead the search engines right to you.
If you take even 2 or 3 of these actions, you'll decrease the time it takes for the search engines to find you. And visitors will rush to your site, just like you wanted!
When it comes to setting up your Blog, there are many options and it's enough to drive you crazy.
Here is some information for each option…
Blogger Versus WordPress
• WordPress offers a lot more customization and has more marketing and SEO power.
• Some people think since Google owns Blogger it gives you a boost - that is not true.
• Blogger has more rules you must follow and it could potentially limit a marketing technique or tactic.
My experience and personal opinion is that any Blog is better than no Blog but if you want to get the most out of your Blog - go WordPress.
There are other Blog platforms as well, but I consider the two main contenders to be WordPress and Blogger so that is all I have commented on.
Once you've decided on your Blog platform, you then have to decide on your Blog structure.
There has been a lot of debate about a Sub-Domain versus a Sub-Directory versus setting up a new domain.
• A sub-domain would be: blog . yoursite . com
• A sub-directory would be: yoursite . com/blog
• A whole new domain would be: newdomain .com
If you go with a whole new domain, then you have no “trust” and history built up and it may take longer for the Blog to get picked up.
It used to be that a sub-domain was treated as its own separate site with a root directory so you got the benefit of link juice and you potentially got more listings in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Since December 2007, Google states this is no longer the case. So you aren't really getting any extra link juice from this structure.
Matt Cutts, the public face of Google had this to say about sub-domains versus sub-directory (as related to the December 2007 change):
“Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn't affect a majority of our queries. In fact, this change has been live for a couple weeks or so now and no one noticed. The only reason I talked about the subject at PubCon at all was because someone asked for my advice on subdomains vs. subdirectories.”
He then goes on to say: “My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content.
A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news .google. com or maps . google . com, for example.
If you're a newer webmaster or SEO, I'd recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you'll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.”
Although his feedback wasn't directly related to setting up Blogs, it still applies. So, based on that feedback, and my own personal success and experience I too vote for a sub-directory.
Don't forget, you may as well make it as search engine friendly as possible and rather than just call the sub-directory Blog (ex: yoursite . com/Blog) you could use a keyword or short keyword phrase (ex: yoursite . com/keyword-Blog or yoursite . com/keyword-phrase-Blog)
So in summary - any Blog is better than no Blog, but to get the most power from your Blog, go with a WordPress Blog in a sub-directory named with a keyword on your own server. Make sure you learn about all the necessary plugins and configure them properly to get the most out of your Blog. Hey - that sounds like a great article topic. Stay tuned!
The most ambitious Internet retailers, hoping to emulate the style and online influence of Amazon.com and other recognized brands, tend to aim for sprawling electronic retail websites that may look pretty but accomplish little else. If all the push is towards what appears on the front end instead of a concerted effort in choosing a reliable e-commerce solution from the get go, these decisions can ultimately impact the long-term success of any SEO campaign.
Most Internet retailers opt to use an out of the box e-commerce solution, eliminating the need to build something more suitable from the ground up. Out of the box software, however, may lack some of the flexibility that is required to implement a robust SEO campaign. On the other hand, building a fully customized e-commerce platform can be outright expensive. In an ideal situation, you will want to look for something that is somewhere in between. To help you bridge the gap, we've identified four major requirements when shopping for a suitable e-commerce solution that's compatible with your SEO campaign.
The Proof's in the Code
Ideally, we would always like to have the code available for us to modify if needed. This constant accessibility allows us to set up server behavior recommendations as well as change the way that things work or function in order to ensure that they are more effective for your SEO campaign. Many vendors will not give out their codes unless you pay them a premium, sometimes upwards of $10,000 per site using that code only, and many vendors may be reluctant to allow even that option.
Search engines only care about resulting code, meaning the HTML is sent to the browser post-parse. So, for an e-commerce website to have an effective SEO campaign, the SEO company you've enlisted may need the ability to modify how the software displays the code while the page is being dynamically built. This usually includes any category pages, product pages, or even some of the more “static” pages, such as the privacy policy, site map, and home page.
Customizable Product Administration
Sometimes we run across platforms that allow us to customize certain attributes of pages from the back-end administration, including Title tags, Meta tags, and body content. This is a great advantage when working with an e-commerce solution that does not provide any sort of code access, as that provides the only way for us to “individualize” the hundreds of dynamic pages that may be present on your website when working on your SEO campaign.
Occasionally, however, the administration sections for your e-commerce solution are not all that robust, and once we have proper access to the underlying code, we have to develop code “hacks” in order to get the recommendations for your SEO campaign onto the website. For instance, when adding these “hacks” to client websites, they often take the form of what appears to be a small configuration file with our recommendations attached to variables. And depending on the page, our configuration file will spit out the proper recommendations for that page, manually adding them where they need to go. Unfortunately, this is usually only accomplished with direct access to underlying code in your e-commerce solution. Furthermore, if direct access is not given, we're often stuck between a rock and a hard place.
A Linux-Based OS
Until IIS can handle .htaccess files (tiny files allowing a wide range of flexibility for your website), an e-commerce solution that runs under Linux is highly desirable for myriad of tasks, such as flattening URLs. Some Windows applications have found ways around this, but they are usually not very aesthetically appealing and don't function as well as a simple rewrite would. Linux, our operating system of choice, is able to run more applications, and the operating system and associated software are much cheaper than their Windows counterparts.
“flatten URLs” - for example, it takes http://www.example.com/products.php?id=437 and changes it into something more friendly, like http://www.example.com/products/Yellow-School-Bus/437/ . By flattening the URL, we make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl the website - ridding ourselves of dynamic querystrings, which, oftentimes, the spiders have difficulty crawling. Furthermore, flattening URLs allows us to add keyphrases from your SEO campaign into the URL to make them even more attractive to the search engines. And even though the URL may appear to be different, because of the .htaccess file, it will work exactly as it did prior to the flattening process.
http://example.com to http://www.example.com - which can be completed entirely on Linux in just two lines that are added to an .htacess file. Implementing this on IIS (Windows) turns out to be an arduous task that involves having root access to the server, which is not often granted by hosting companies.
Flexibility is Key
Often, an SEO company will need to change how a page is displayed or what is displayed and when, perhaps in order to boost rankings and traffic for your SEO campaign. This is where the flexibility of the software comes into play for any effective e-commerce solution. For instance, there is an e-commerce solution that can provide header, footer, and page templates directly through the backend administration.
However, there are some vendors that prefer to lock away the templates by hard-coding them into the site code. The real paradox is when they won't give you access to the code to modify these things for yourself. This kind of inflexibility can spell disaster for any SEO campaign.
Avoiding Long-Term Hassles
At this point in time, there aren't any specific recommendations to give on a top performing e-commerce solution as nothing we've come across thus far is anywhere near perfect. Unless your company has an in-house SEO technician, you'd be wise to engage a knowledgeable SEO company to avoid the headaches that come with finding out that you've spent a significant amount of time and money on an e-commerce solution that does not offer the flexibility needed for a successful SEO campaign.
If you end up choosing an e-commerce solution that doesn't meet the requirements outlined above, you may just end up with a half optimized site that fails to achieve the rankings and traffic you've been hoping for at the outset of your SEO campaign.
As user-generated website popularity surges so too does the need for "intense" Web hosting.
Through new forms of technology, such as digital video, blogging and podcasting, infinite numbers of end-users now have the power to create and spread their views as they see fit. Prominent examples such as Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia reflect this unlimited – and unpredictable – potential for content, images, videos and more.
Such immense levels of website usage mean that, behind the scenes, Web hosting providers need to be at the top of their game offering their social media clients the utmost in infrastructure and support. TopHosts asked two leading Web hosts what it takes to support this niche user-generated website market and how they go about helping social media website owners meet their goals.
Rackspace in the United Kingdom is reporting a huge uptake in user-generated website clientele, which they say involves great peaks and troughs in demand. The Web host previously announced the signing of two big social media customers, Woyano Pro social media platform and Wadja.com, a social networking site for mobile devices. Their current social media customer portfolio also includes makefriendsonline and Let's Decide.
Fabio Torlini, Marketing Director for Rackspace, says solid infrastructure and scalability are the most important elements for ensuring the success of their social media websites. “It's a pretty new phenomenon, but the (user-generated) sites very much want to grow quickly,” Torlini said. “If the site takes off then they're going to need the right support and infrastructure… and the whole package, which is what we can give them.”
The tremendous potential for growth by user-generated sites calls for top-quality bandwidth capabilities, such as Rackspace's unlimited bandwidth guarantee. Torlini says social media websites also need access to enterprise level storage or advanced storage area networks (SAN), because content uploads can easily reach capacity in very short amounts of time. So for all the massive amounts of data these sites bring in, Web hosts must be able to provide ample storage space at all times.
Aaron Phillips, Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Fatsserver.Net, agrees social media clients require “intense hosting” and Enterprise Level storage for uptime and top performance. Fastserver handles many social networking sites, from regional to international to smaller non-profit groups, which have always contributed greatly to their growth. Lifelogger.com and yo4ya.com are their largest social media site clients, with massive communities and followings.
Besides providing large amounts of bandwidth and disk space, these sites need a scalable solution that can grow with them. “The major focus we provide to social media sites is our ability to design custom solutions tailored specifically for significant and fast growth, Phillips added. “Our enterprise team can design, test, and deploy solutions where an initial single server plan can grow into a multi-server enterprise solution in a short period of time.”
The biggest challenge facing social media networking, Phillips says, is vast growth management. Even the most prepared website clients, with extensive marketing plans, demographics and growth projections, can't be sure how they might progress. Phillips explained that specific niche sites often grow at rates that far exceed initial expectations, and that's why Web hosts need to offer solutions that can quickly scale according to those growth patterns.
A hosting provider's commitment to security is another important feature for social media sites to consider, Torlini of Rackspace said. Vast amounts of content are constantly uploaded to these sites, so online abuse and security threats are inevitable. User generated sites should look to hosting infrastructure with security features built in it, across all components. Torlini highlighted Rackspace's multi-layered approach to security, with 24x7x365 staffed security and the monitoring of both internal devices and external threats.
Businesses and designers alike prefer Flash web banners over animated GIF banners because Flash web banners allow more complex animations, have high graphic quality, and can include scripting features and interactivity, all of which are desirable for e-commerce.
End users, in turn, benefit from Flash's smaller files, faster download times and streaming capabilities. For example, a short banner animation can play in the forefront while the main banner downloads in the background. And Flash banners are now almost universally accepted, displaying on more than 96 percent of computers with Internet connections.
But Flash banners aren't designed as well as they could be when it comes to file size. If not handled skillfully, Flash files can become too big and take too long to download. Below are some important tips that will trim the fat from your Flash file and leave you with a lean, mean banner machine.
(Note : These tips assume you have a copy of Macromedia Flash and are familiar with its functions.)
* Colors
* Gradients
* Symbols
* Fonts
* Lines
* Bitmap images
* Sound
* Animation
* Exporting
Colors
1. When working with colors, use a limited color palette on your Flash banner.
2. Web-safe colors are best because your Flash banner's colors will look the same across all major browsers and platforms.
Gradients
1. Use gradients sparingly on Flash banners. Each area of a gradient fill requires more data than a solid fill.
2. Left-to-right (horizontal) linear gradients are preferable to up-and-down (vertical) gradients as browsers read them more quickly.
Symbols
To understand advanced optimizing in Flash, you must first know how to create symbols. Symbols are elements in your movie that you select for using over and over again. Symbols can be graphics, buttons, movie clips, sound files or fonts.
1. By creating a symbol, the symbol is stored in the Flash file's library, which you can grab and place for multiple uses and edits. Symbols reduce file size because no matter how many times you make and place a symbol, Flash stores the symbol in the file only once.
2. For advanced color optimizing, use the effects panel's tint to create different colored instances of a single symbol instead of creating multiple symbols.
3. Be careful not to overuse the alpha transparency color effect. It can slow playback.
Fonts
1. Limit the number of fonts and font styles you use in your Flash banners. For embedded font options, select only the characters needed instead of the entire font.
2. Use font symbols as shared library assets. A library is where all your symbols are stored. You can access the main library by going to Window > Library, or you can access a shared library by defining the linkage properties of the original library's items or assets.
To use the assets from a shared library in another movie, choose File > Open As Shared Library in your current movie and select the shared library file you want to use.
Lines
1. Limit the number of special line styles used, such as dashed and dotted. Solid lines require less memory. Also, lines created with the pencil tool require less memory than brush strokes.
2. Use Modify > Optimize to minimize the number of separate lines in your shapes.
Limiting the number of special line effects will also keep the file size of your Flash banners low. The commands Convert Lines to Fills, Expand Shape, and Soften Edge in the Modify > Shape submenu increase the number of vector elements in your file.
Bitmap images
1. Bitmap graphic images imported into Flash, such as a photo or a file from another software program, take up more file size than Flash (vector) graphics. Use them sparingly.
2. Size bitmap images to the exact dimensions you need before importing them into Flash. This includes reducing image quality as much as possible.
3. Avoid animating bitmap elements, whenever possible, if you must use them in Flash banners.
4. Try converting your bitmaps to vector graphics. Sometimes you will achieve a considerably smaller file size.
5. Adjust the JPEG quality of bitmap files and turn off the Smoothing option for bitmap images in a movie's library. Playback will be faster because the bitmaps will render more quickly.
Sound
1. To choose sound compression options, use the options in the Export Settings of the Sound Properties dialog box. Use the lowest sampling rate and bit depth required. Sixteen Kbps should suffice for most situations.
2. Instead of using a long sound file, take a segment of the file and set it to loop, that is, to repeat itself.
3. Choose fast in your quality button under Sound Settings. Fast gives better compression results than medium or best.
4. In the Compression menu from the Sound Properties dialog box, choose ADPCM (Advanced Differential Pulse Code Modulation) for short sounds, and streaming (MP3 compression setting) for longer sounds such as background music and soundtracks.
Animation
1. File size increases with the number of frames. Use symbols for every element in your banner that appears and changes in more than one frame.
2. Use key frames and twining to reduce the number of individual frames and keep your file size down to a minimum. Avoid using too many twining operations at one time, however. Too many could significantly slow playback.
3. Animate a fixed area of your banner, not everywhere on it.
4. Choose motion twining over shape twining. Motion twee symbols instead of grouping objects.
5. Use caution when creating complex symbols or having many symbols in a single frame. It might cause the movie to pause while symbols are downloading
Exporting to the Web
1. Flash movies for export — SWF or ShockWave Flash movie — require you to also save an HTML file. The HTML document is needed to activate the Flash movie and specifies the browser settings, including where the Flash movie appears on screen and the movie size. You can change these settings in the HTML panel of the Publish Settings dialog box.
2. Be sure to choose carefully among the anti-aliasing options found in the HTML section of a movie's Publish Settings. We usually recommend auto high.
3. Use the bandwidth profiler to see if your movie meets or exceeds your target audience's connection speed. You can see where a movie may be paused to wait for a large file to download.
Flash is a powerful tool for creating web banners. It will take time to learn all the features. But keep these optimizing tips in mind and you will be able to make stunning banners that are quick to download.
Let's say you have made your first “great” video. You have critiqued it, massaged it and perfected it. You feel good about it. Now what?
If you want to increase traffic to your website, create backlinks to your site.
Backlinks are one-way links pointing to your site from other sites. The search engines put a great deal of importance on these. In a sense, backlinks say to the world, your website is a trusted, worthwhile site because all these other sites point to it.
You will want to post the video to several video sharing sites, to magnify the video's effect. Each time someone watches your video, you get another linkback ping . . . wow! Be sure you use your keywords in the description of the video. Also, start your description with your full URL, including the http: etc. This will help people find your video.
Make sure that you look at several videos on each site so that you can determine whether your video will fit on their site. For example, if your video is about “Eating Healthfully”, don't expect to place it on a site dedicated to news. If your video is not a How-to type, for example, it won't be accepted by HowCast.com. Do not post to a video sharing site that is too diverse from what your video is about. Who on that site will watch it?
Fill in the profile information portion of the video sharing site that tells about you, shows your picture, your likes and dislikes, favorite books and hobbies. This information makes you a real person. If people like your video, they will look at your profile. Potentially, they will be in line with you in some way and perhaps want to create a sharing relationship, or other mutually beneficial link to you.
Don't forget to post to your video to the social networking sites like Digg.com, Mixx, Propeller, Reddit and others. Some won't let you put your video on their site, but you can still put your article on their site. Your article is a summary of what the video is about. Your article will point them to your video which is hosted on your site.
This technique needs a little more explaining:
• Post your video on your blog
• Write an article, to accompany your video, using the appropriate keywords that describe your video. (Remember, the search engines, at this time, cannot look at your video to see what it is about . . . you will have to tell them in your article.)
• Post your article on the social networking sites, mentioning the video.
• Point them to your article and video which resides on your website.
Video Sharing Site List & Page Rank:
• Google Video 9
• Blip 8
• BrightCove 8
• MotionBox 8
• PhotoBucket 8
• Yahoo Video 8
• YouTube 8
• UncutVideo(AOL) 7
• DailyMotion 7
• Esnips 7
• iFilm 7
• MetaCafe 7
• Myspace 7
• Revver 7
• Vimeo 7
• HowCast 6
• Crackle 6
• Break 6
• Buzznet 6
• EyeSpot 6
• Flixya 6
• Grouper 6
• GoFish 6
• JumpCut 6
• Kwego 6
• LiveVideo 6
• Lulu 6
• Multiply 6
• MyHeavy 6
• OurMedia 6
• PutFile 6
• SoapBox(MSN) 6
• StupidVideos 6
• Veoh 6
• VMix 6
• VidiLife 6
• ZippyVideos 6
• CastPost 5
• ClipShack 5
• Doty 5
• DoveTail 5
• Famster 5
• ManiaTV 5
• MeraVideo 5
• Openvlog 5
• Porkolt 5
• Sharkle 5
• VideoWebTown 5
• Vsocial 5
• VidMax 4
• Apanatube 3
In summary, in this article we covered:
• Your website needs backlinks.
• Search engines put great weight on backlinks.
• Increase your exposure by posting your video on many sites.
• Make sure that you look first to see what type of videos and demographic they are targeting.
• It will take some extra time, but make sure that you fill in the information in the profile section. This information makes you a real person.
• Don't forget to post to the social networking sites like Digg, etc.
No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms… SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.
Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche - you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.
Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time.
1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them.
You must understand search engines are simply businesses who supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.
2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings.
You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches. Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don't forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting “long-tail” keywords been very beneficial for me.
3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content.
Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, made sure all your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages should be no more than three levels away from it - keeping a sitemap listing all your major pages makes the search engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title, description, keywords… are all optimized. (Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters) Remember, your title and description should not only be keyword targeted but these are the first contact/impression anyone will see of your site - make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.
4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google.
Don't ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser, Google's influence will only grow stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google's Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content for Google. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my niche keywords and for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.
5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost your search rankings.
Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites related to your niche market and make sure the ‘anchor text' is related to your keywords but don't ignore the text and overall quality of the content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable portion of a link. Don't forget linking is a two-way street, make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant sites in your niche.
6. Article Marketing is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it still works.
Writing short 500 - 700 word informative helpful articles with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an extensive network of distribution including SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters… plus other major online sites. Don't forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your article distribution. And always remember you're also using these articles to pre-sale your content or products. Don't forget to leverage sites like Squidoo, Hubpages… to increase your rankings and traffic.
7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me.
These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts - a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts. Works similar as a sub-domain but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always using a hyphen in your urls but underscores have worked fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind you're creating content to first satisfy your visitors.
8. WordPress blog software is extremely effective for SEO purposes.
WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blogs to help distribute my content.
9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on the web.
These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter… media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati… you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and using them. It's time consuming but it will keep you in the swing of things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a WordPress plug-in or I like using a simple free site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on all my content.
10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO.
You must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly, you just don't want SEO - you want effective SEO. In order to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance, Authority and Conversions.
First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic or niche area you're pursuing - your content must fit in and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That's why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines, they give only relevant content to what's been searched for or discussed.
Second, your content/site must be perceived as an authority site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and the search engines will love you and your content. One way is to develop this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form links/partnerships with other perceived authority sites in your field. Always strive to make your site an authority site - tops in your niche - the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a conclusion.
Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you're into online marketing, conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.
Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic you're seeking, just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for you and your site in no time at all.
Promoting and advertising your network marketing and MLM business online is challenging. There are many different ways to go about it. If you want to promote your business inexpensively and effectively, message boards and forums are a solid and proven way to do it.
Choosing the Right Message Boards
There are lots of message boards and forums online, on just about every topic you can imagine. Since you are promoting your network marketing business, you will want to choose boards related to home business or working from home. This is where people looking for ways to make money will hang out.
Go to Google and do a search for “home business message boards”, “work from home discussions”, and similar keywords. This will bring up a list of boards and forums that you can visit. Look for boards that are active. Most will display the last post date for their various topics, and the total number of posts in the topic. Look for lots of recent posts as a sign that the message board is active and thriving.
Learn About the Community
Once you have chosen some boards to visit, take time to visit them and do some reading. Get a feel for the community and the type of discussions that go on there. Take a look at the board rules and make sure that “signatures” are okay - most forums allow them, but a few don't. Once you have a good feel for the community, create an account and get ready to start posting.
The First Rule for Using Message Boards
The first rule for using message boards to promote your network marketing business - do not post advertisements, or direct invitations to consider your opportunity unless the board has a specific section set aside for ads. The boards you want to use will have strict rules about advertising. Posting ads in discussion areas will not attract prospects for your business, and you risk getting banned from posting in the future.
Become a Contributor and Build Your Reputation
Your goal is to establish yourself as an authority and a valuable contributor to the community. There are many more people reading these boards than actually posting, so each time you post, a lot of potential prospects will see it. Will they see you as a leader? This is your objective. Your first thought should be “how can I help or contribute something positive”. You will attract leads for your MLM business over time by doing this.
Creating Your Profile and Signature
Before you get started, be sure to fill out your profile. This is where you can tell more about yourself and create your signature. People can click on your profile at any time and find out more about who you are. Make your profile as complete and meaningful as possible.
Your signature will appear at the bottom of each post you submit. It can contain a link to your site, and usually a line or two you can use for a mini-advertisement.
Once your profile is set up, start looking for messages where someone is asking for help, or a discussion about a home business or network marketing related topic. If you know something that will help someone or contribute to the discussion, post it! Draw on your past experiences. Take time to provide thoughtful and meaningful replies.
Again, the key to making this work is establishing yourself as a leader and someone who is knowledgeable about network marketing and home business in general. People reading the boards will get to know you and you will begin to receive inquiries and visits to your opportunity site after you've been active for a while.
Pick a few boards to work with, and try to post something as often as possible. Daily posting is best, but if time is limited you can contribute 3-4 times a week and do well. You want to be seen as active and involved, and frequent posting is the way to achieve this.
Final Thoughts
Proper use of message boards and forums for promoting your network marketing and MLM business can be very effective. The key is to present yourself as a professional. Set yourself apart.
The Internet is full of self-serving business opportunity peddlers who take every opportunity to spam and promote their business on message boards while contributing nothing. These people do not succeed. You, by presenting yourself as a professional, will do well.
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A few weeks ago I wrote about building your website from the ground up. This article did not dive into great detail on any specific topics, but rather touched on the key points you will want to address. In this article I will place most of the focus on the promotion aspect of this previous article.
While at times new websites can experience organic search rankings in a matter of months, for the most part, it can take well over a year before you start to see any progress, and that is if you start promoting right away!
SEO
If your new website has not been properly optimized for the search engines, then this is a necessary first step you must take. Ensure that your new site has integrated the appropriate keywords into all the fundamental areas of the site. Without this critical step of optimizing your site, in many cases no level of promotion will help you get those search rankings.
Note:
Extreme numbers of inbound links can sometimes cause an un-optimized site to rank, but an optimized website will drastically reduce the number of links needed, and its associated cost. This varies from industry to industry, but is true as a general rule.
Ideally the optimization of your site occurred during the planning and building stages, but if it did not be sure to get this completed as soon as possible.
Press Releases
The first thing you should do when your site goes live is issue a press release. Be sure to include a link back to your website, preferably with your target phrase hyperlinked as well. Submit this press release to an aggregator such as PRWeb. This will help get the word out that your site is live, draw some attention from the public, and also get you that first valuable link to your website.
Search Engine Submission
These days search engines will find your site on their own, and submitting to them is not necessary. If you feel you must submit your site to the engines, submit it only once and shortly after the site goes live.
In order to help the search engines fully spider your new site, the best thing you can do in terms of submissions, is to create and submit an XML sitemap. Submit this sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tools account, and also be sure to include a call to it within your robots.txt file by adding the following line including a complete path to your sitemap:
Sitemap : http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
There are many tools out there to help you build your xml sitemap. Google has placed a list of some of these tools on their “Third Party Programs” page.
Directory Submission
Back in August I wrote about using Directory Submission to help build links. The general gist of it is to be sure that there is a high level of relevance in the directories you submit your site to, especially if it is a paid directory. Currently DMOZ still has a high level of value as it is seen as a strong authority at Google. Make the attempt to have your site listed here in the most relevant category possible.
Link Building
There are a number of ways you can work to increase your back links. In July I wrote about 13 ways to help build links. Links are one of those strategic tools that will never be a bad investment. Today they play a significant role in search rankings for most industries, especially in Google. While the future will almost undoubtedly still see search value in links, even if that value declines, or disappears entirely, quality links can still help drive traffic as well, and a strong base of inbound links can deliver you customers well into the future.
Explore the different ways to build links to your site. A steady progressive increase in inbound links will help Google look positively in your direction. Do not be afraid of reciprocal links either. If you are trading with highly relevant websites to your industry, then you should have nothing to be afraid of.
Social Media
Promotion largely consists of building links and becoming recognized by the search engines, but in order to help you build those links, getting your name and brand out there can really do wonders. By increasing awareness of your site and product, the public will often help create the buzz you need, and often, this can result in fresh links to your website.
To help get your site in the eyes of as many people as possible, take a look into Social Media and consider creating profiles on some of the popular platforms. This can include creating a YouTube account and uploading instructional, informational, or interesting product videos. You can set up a Facebook page, and work to build a community around your product. Create a profile page on Squidoo, MySpace, and Flickr, amongst many others.
These pages often act as backlinks to your site, and also help spread awareness. Be sure to keep your social endeavors updated regularly or any viewership you have will dwindle as people lose interest. If you are able to build a strong following, this can result in many individuals linking to your site and spreading the word, resulting in long term benefits for you and your site.
Your use of social media does not have to be exactly about your company. For instance, let's say you sell cars. Your use of the social platform, while it may note your business, can focus on other car info including trivia, news, photos, etc. The key is to keep it relevant, not identical - you are not looking to create a mirror of your site.
Article Writing
Write articles about the subject of your website and submit them to various services such as EzineArticles. Consider also writing for your own blog to help grow your site content. By writing and distributing relevant articles you can create a nice cushion of relevant incoming links. By writing articles that closely match the topic of your site, and including a link back to relevant content within your site, you can help out not only with search engine rankings, but by creating an extra traffic stream for your site.
Pay Per Click
While Pay Per Click (PPC) will not give you many long standing benefits, it can help you to start making sales immediately which in turn can give you the funds needed to promote your site via other means. If you need that immediate traffic, this is one way to get it, but at a cost, and as soon as you stop paying, your traffic stops, so it is far from a reliable long term means. In some industries however, it can pay off, so it is definitely worth considering.
Summary
In general, reference your website everywhere possible. Get links from every relevant source you can think of, issue a press release, and get your site listed the key directories for your industry. The more eyes you can put your URL in front of and the more relevant sites you can get to link back to yours, the sooner you will start to see progress in the search engines.
For many industries it can literally take years to get those coveted first page results - in some industries it may be near impossible, but if you want a chance, you need to start promoting that new site of yours immediately.
Article writing is a great way to showcase your talents and expertise. If you want to make a name for yourself and brand yourself as an expert in your niche, then articles are a great way to allow the reader to see just how much you know about your niche. Writing an article can get you some credibility, but writing a feature article puts you a bit higher on the credibility scale.
A feature article is an article that is showcased in a newsletter or on a website. It is an article that is considered valuable to it's readers and goes into a bit more depth that a typical 450 to 500 word article. Featured articles can be anywhere from 650 to 1000 words long and are definitely high quality. Featured articles aren't sales letters, or a spammy keyword-stuffed stream of consciousness to get better search engine rankings. Featured articles solve a problem common in your niche, answer frequently asked questions, or provide a different way of looking at the something in your target niche.
The best way to write one of these articles is to see what are some of the common questions people have in your target niche. You can find these questions from going to a forum in your niche, one of the groups in Yahoo or Google, or you could even put up a survey form on your site and see what kinds of questions visitors leave on your site. The last way of getting questions is the most powerful because you can really target your feature article to your site in the resource box of the article (”for more answers to questions like these go to mysite.com”).
Once you have your article, you will want to get it featured in some sort of online publication. You have a choice of having it featured on a website, or in a newsletter. If you want your article featured in a newsletter, you will have a better chance approaching the publisher of the newsletter that is targeted to the audience in your niche. You can go to many of the newsletter directories and see which ones take article submissions and then approach them. You will increase your chances if you sign up for their newsletter first so you can get a good understanding of how their newsletter is structured, and what kind of articles they publish in their newsletter. It will also give you something to talk to the publisher about in regards to their newsletter. What did you like about the article? What didn't you like? This will prove you are there for more than just a “what can you give me” mentality. If you have some other articles that have been published in other newsletters, you can share this information with the publisher as well.
If you are looking to have your article featured on a website in your niche, a good way to find websites is to do a search for them in the search engines. Doing the following search string will give you a list of websites that publish featured articles: “<>” +”featured articles”. You can then go to the websites and see if they publish articles from other authors. Once you find a website, you can take a similar approach of the Webmaster that you did with the publisher. You would share with them what you liked about their website and ask them if they would like to publish any of your articles. If you present your request in a way that will show the webmaster the benefit they will get out of publishing your article on their website, you will increase your chances of having your article published.
Having your articles featured on a website or in a newsletter, you give you additional credibility in your niche. Featured articles should be high quality and provide value to the visitor of the website or subscriber of the newsletter. The style of approach you take with the Webmaster or publisher also makes a difference in whether or not you can get your articles featured.
Since link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO, let's take a minute to revisit some very important link building and website optimization tactics.
Trust, timing and authority are three metrics that impact the target site for building links. Sites that rank at the helm of search engines (above the fold on the first page) do so because of fundamental characteristics shared across multiple industries, websites and topics.
Sites ranking in the top 10 are there because they :
(1) either started before others realized the potential for those keywords and have an advantage of time to market / indexing saturation
(2) because they understand link popularity and have built a plethora of links from a variety of sites or
(3) because they understand the value of a good domain, site architecture and on page optimization.
Not to say that this is the only way, but we are only focusing on three metrics for the sake of argument. I have mentioned before that chronology begets authority, in layman's terms, if you started years ago optimizing, refining and grooming your site for higher search engine visibility, you understand the layers involved in producing high ranking search engine result pages.
The typical process is, you make a change to a page, you wait for the page to get indexed (typically you may build some links to expedite the process). Then when the page is indexed, you measure the result of your on page adjustments (tweaks to content, titles, tags, and code), you monitor the impact of the inbound links then evaluate how to bump it up another notch.
This process of refinement is an ongoing obsession until the goal is achieved (until you break the top 20) and then you have to wait for time to infer the element of trust to your page which results in the search result creeping its way to the top 10. Based on how well you implemented the previous steps will determine where your page finally stabilizes in the search results.
I am referring to more competitive terms here, long tail key phrases (keywords that have 3 or more keywords combined) can move to the top 10 unchallenged with the right tactic. Balancing your profile of long tail and competitive phrases is imperative for stabilizing traffic and appealing to an entire audience rather than just the tip of the iceberg.
By selecting a range of keywords, creating content and building links back to that content using a variety of keywords and keyword modifiers.
You are essentially priming the pump for what is to come after 30-90 days when those links have had a chance to pass the quality check from search engines and start passing real value. Link building is cumulative, so understanding the law of cycles and when to fertilize the seeds you plant (your keywords) is crucial for harvesting search engine traffic as a result.
In any case, once you are able to measure the impact, you can assess if you :
(a) need to leverage other pages or parts of your site (such as creating a series of posts or pages on the topic) to get enough traction for the keywords in question or
(b) just need more links to give the page buoyancy in search engines.
The idea here is to keep in mind that a natural progression towards a keyword objective is much safer to acquire over time. There is no need to disregard a moderate link velocity (link velocity is the rate in which you gain or lose links to your pages).
The ideal scenario would be to couple links with timely bursts of content with the intention of creating more value topically in the site. More pages equate to additional opportunities to rank for related overlapping keywords that you can interlink (much like wikipedia) to bring each page up in the rankings like the buddy system.
Which leads to the next point, there is a natural phenomenon that occurs over time as words stem across semantically related keywords and synonyms, this is referred to as “keyword stemming”. Ideally this process takes 3-6 months for a given range of keywords as long as a series of fresh or seasoned inbound links are linking to the page in question.
The first objective for SEO is to put the site in order (including site architecture, robots.txt file, .htacess file, remove spider traps and coding errors) in other words groom the on page factors.
The second objective is to create the appropriate content that will eventually mature into the perfect on page topical relevance and mature to an independently ranking page in 3-6 months. Creating content with the objective of future tense expression is part of a layered and tiered optimization strategy and is imperative for either creating 301 redirects eventually or using those pages as anchors for fresh related content (by linking from them to new pages).
The third objective is to build relevance for other pages besides the home page. Creating the appropriate balance of page rank and how page rank flows throughout the site (as a result of navigation, site maps, anchor text and back links).
This step is crucial for developing a site with website authority which is a key ranking factor based on trust, relevance and popularity. A common ratio is 35% of the total inbound links should go to your homepage, the other 65% should be to deep links (pages other than your home page).
The fourth objective for SEO would be to create keyword stemming across a series of predetermined keywords through systematic expression. Start with 10, those 10 turn into 20 or 30, then develop another 20 keywords (to create topical relevance for the topic) and those 20 turn into 50 keywords, etc.
Then in 6 months, as you add new keywords each month the previous round creates keyword stemming to lay the foundation for the next round and the next round of link building and content creation. This is one very successful search engine optimization strategy that uses timing, link diversity and content on a stable platform to produce relevant results based on on page and off page SEO factors unifying harmoniously.
By managing these steps, it is possible with a game plan and series of tiered strategies to acquire multiple traffic bearing keywords across an entire range of phrases that an individual may use to find your website. Instead of relying on a narrow range of keywords to deliver traffic (since you never really know which terms will outperform others until you optimize them). This tactic is based on topical relevance, link diversity, deep links, aging pages and website authority and using a variety of anchor text for link popularity to promote keyword stemming.
This is one of many methods you can use to scale your results to climb over your competition and gain the highest potential relevance score for each page of your website. That is, if you can see beyond the parts an view your website holistically as an interdependent organism capable of scaling to accommodate distinct conversion objectives.
