You can read the full article about this infographic, with some great insights and ideas about how to optimise your landing pags over on the SEOMoz Blog:  the-12step-landing-page-rehab-program-infographic.

Some key points from the “12-step program”

• Use a separate landing page for each traffic source (email, PPC, Facebook, etc)
• Test your landing pages with A/B testing
• Make sure the page headers match what the user has clicked
• Videos on landing pages can increase conversion rates by about 80% (80? Wow!)
• Long forms = less interactions
• Refine the page copy, cut ruthlessly, rinse, repeat
• One page, one purpose (bpodr TOP TIP!)

The types of content they suggest are:

1. Lists
2. Create a great infographic
3. Have an argument
4. Say something controversial
5. Be a contrarian
6. Build tools
7. Launch a competition
8. Get an exclusive
9. Release a whitepaper
10. Be helpful
11. Amuse an dentertain
12. Involve the crowd
13. Say something bad about Apple
14. Write killer headlines
15. Do something new

While the list delivers some great food for thought, it is just that – food. Sorry, I mean thought. These are ideas on how your content could become great link-bait material, not the final content itself. Some of these ideas should be used almost all the time (choose one of: Be helpful, Amuse and entertain, Write killer headlines), whilst others may not fit into your own site’s content strategy. That’s fine, you don’t need them all, you just need to make sure whatever content your site is producing is relevant to your products or services, and it’s interesting. If you can’t do that, say something controversial.

If you’re struggling for content ideas, hopefully you’ll find something useful to dislodge that writers block…

I decided to post it anyway, and use it as an opportunity to ease my embarrassment about bpodr.co.uk’s speed issues – I’d set myself a 7-day challenge: Improve the speed and performance of bpodr.co.uk.

I knew what I needed to do, I knew how to do it, but I was struggling to find the time. A public announcement that I was going to improve things seemed the perfect piece of pressure, and it proved to be exactly what was needed (of course, there’s also the danger that I could have failed miserably, and shattered any trace of credibility I may have). Anyway, here’s the results of my 7-day page speed challenge:

bpodr.co.uk: Now 60% Slimmer and 33% Faster!

How we did it…

The last post outlined a few techniques for improving the speed of a website, so I started my speed improvements there. I decided to implement these small changes to the bpodr.co.uk home page, and ensured none of the changes affected the look or the content on the page. I documented the size of the page, and the number of objects (images, files, scripts) that are requested when the page is loaded, at the start of the challenge and after each round of changes. This showed me what gains (or losses) I made for each speed enhancement.

N.B. I didn’t measure the speed after each change – it’s a fair conclusion that speed, although relative to each user (based on their computer speed, browser used, connection speed, etc), would improve as the page got lighter, and the number of images downloaded decreased.

Before we started…

Firstly, I wanted to know how things were before I started making changes, so I benchmarked the speed and size of bpodr.co.uk using Browsermob.com.

The results were: Size: 431kb, Average Speed: 2.30 seconds, Number of Objects:32.

Compared to Google’s published web averages, this made us about 25% larger than the average website waddling around in cyberspace, with a few extra objects being loaded. A little bloat around MY waist I can handle, but I’m not prepared to accept it on a website of mine, and so I needed to draw up a plan to shed those extra kilobytes, and take bpodr.co.uk from overweight to fighting weight (cue rocky music…)

The website weight loss programme begins…

1. Combine JS and CSS files

I started with a quick win: Reduce the number of files that the browser has to load for the page to work correctly. A lot of sites call multiple Javascript files, some of which are hosted externally to the site that’s loading, as well as multiple CSS files (CSS files control the way your web site looks). By reducing the number of files that need to be loaded, there’s less trips between the server and the user’s browser, saving precious nano-seconds! I managed to reduce the number of files on bpodr.co.uk from 5 to 2, and also moved a file from loading on an external server to our own server.

2. Compress Image Sizes

Compressing image sizes takes a little longer than reducing the number of scripts loaded on a page. The benefit here is in reducing the size of each image your page is loading (as long as you’re not compromising the quality of the images). There were 10 images that were in need of a good compression on the bpodr.co.uk site…

3. Turned images to Sprites

Creating sprite images can be a time-consuming task – it’s basically converting multiple background images from a page into just one image. That one image then loads once, but displays a different portion of itself to show the various images contained within it (uncross your eyes now!). The page benefits from having to load less separate images from the server – less trips to the server = faster loading, yippee!

There are other compression techniques that were already implemented on the bpodr.co.uk site, such as file compression, and some caching of files and images. If I hadn’t implemented these on the site during the build, I’m confident we would have seen some extra improvement to the size and
speed of the site.

We already know that I reduced the waistline of the page by around 60%, but let’s see it in a fancy table:

So what was the final result on the speed test?

From 2.30 seconds to 1.53 seconds average loading time: a 33% increase in speed! It also means we’ve got a significantly smaller size, and less images loading than the web’s page average (according to Google). So the page is now slimmer and faster, and better than your average page – a true athlete amongst web pages. bpodr.co.uk snr would be proud.

These improvements show us that big gains can be made to the size of a site, and therefore it’s size, using some fairly basic techniques. We can draw some conclusions from this 7-day challenge:

• The biggest size reduction came from compressing images,
• All of the above activity improved the size of the site,
• Less visits to the server and smaller file sizes equals faster loading times for sites.

How optimised is your site for speed? Remember, if it’s not well optimised, and below the ‘Google average’ you could be doing your site rankings some harm. It’s not going to result in jail time, but it may mean your site isn’t working as hard as it could be.

Why not set your web developer the 7-day page speed challenge, and trim some weight off of your web pages…

It seems widespread broadband and high-speed Internet has removed our page-loading time shackles. Maybe all this spare speed, though, has made us complacent…

Google want’s to make sure the web is fast. And what Google wants, the webmaster masses usually deliver, or they run the risk of being ignored by the King of on-line traffic. The speed of a site is now one of Google’s ranking factors (which means it takes speed into account when deciding the order of Search Engine Results Pages). The speed of a site is fast becoming important again.

Google seems to be on a site speed mission, and part of this mission has been to provide benchmarks for average site speed and size across the web. Google has published some data about a sample of pages (around 4.2 billion – that’s 4,200,000,000 – of them) from around the web:

• The average page size is 320Kb
• The average page has 29 images
• Only about two-thirds of stuff on an average page is correctly compressed for speed

The average speed of a site will always vary, depending on the visitors Internet connection, computer speed, Browser version, and other factors, but we can look at averages for benchmarking purposes.

How do you compare to the ‘Average’ site?

Want to know how your site performs for speed? Try running a report on BrowserMob.com – their free website performance test is a great place to start: Type in your site address, click ‘Run Free Test’, and the size, loading time, and number of objects on the page are returned. Compare your site to Google’s findings above: If the size of your site is lower than 320Kb and the number of objects less than 29, give yourself a pat on the back – chances are, you have a better than average site speed. Higher than 320 and 29? Ouch. You could be losing out in the rankings  war with your competitors for no good reason – site speed is fairly straight-forward to put right.

So how do I make my site faster?

There are a lot of quick wins your web developer can implement to speed up your site, and if it’s not already in place you should really look at getting it done. It’s estimated that only about 1% of Google’s ranking factor depends on site speed, but that’s still 1% you can easily control and have working right – so there’s no excuse! Also, think of your site visitors: don’t they deserve a fast experience of your site, even on a slow connection?

Making your site faster doesn’t mean compromising on images, cutting out paragraphs of text, or regressing the design to 1998, there are a few key things that can be implemented to speed things up whilst keeping your site looking exactly the same. There’s no silver bullet, but small improvements quickly add up. Ask your webmaster how many of these tricks are implemented on your site:

• Gzip Compression – make sure your site content, scripts, and images are being compressed correctly. This can make sites up to 50% lighter in size. Easy to implement – a true quick win.

• Using CSS Sprites – CSS sprites is a cool (in a web geek kinda way) technique to reduce the number of images that need to be loaded onto a page by combining them into one file. Used by some of the largest sites on the web, it’s not a quick task, but delivers serious speed gains.

• Combine JS and CSS files – The more files you load into a page, the longer it takes. Combine your scripts and CSS files into as few as possible, saving unnecessary load. A quick easy win.

• Compressing Images – Most modern graphic packages feature clever techniques to reduce the size (in terms of Kb’s) of an image, without compromising it’s quality. Ensure your images are properly compressed for a quick speed gain. If you don’t use  agraphics package, you can always compress images on-line, for free, using Yahoo’s Smush It! tool. A time-consuming, but very worthwhile speed win.

• Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) – If you rely on lots of images, videos and large PDF or Word files, then think about hosting those on a CDN – it allows files to be loaded much quicker than your average host. It’s basically a network of server specifically tasked with serving files quickly to visitors. Amazon provides a fantastically cost-effective solution. Not free, not quick to implement, but if you need to serve big files, or a lot of images, a CDN can really help.

The bpodr Site Speed Challenge

As the saying goes, “The shoemakers children are all bare foot” (at least, that’s what I remember from the saying) – the point is: as web developers, it’s very easy for us to concentrate on our clients sites, and neglect our own. The number of web designers who’s sites have been in a permanent state of construction are testament to this, and we’re no different. We try and keep our site on the cutting edge, but don’t try nearly hard enough. We’re already improving our site messages, case studies, blogging, and SEO, now it’s time to speed things up. I’m sharing our site speed with you here now, and setting myself a one week deadline to improve things, to show how it can be done. This is how things stand at bpodr.co.uk today (15th July 2010):

Not great, but the site was always a ‘work-in-progress’ (for work-in-progress, read: excuse.) I’m going to be making the sort of tweaks we make for our clients on our site over the next 7 days, then I’ll report back here the improvements and speed gains we’ve managed to get. Bet you can’t wait for that!

Pay attention to the speed of your site…

Next time you’re frustrated by the time it’s taking for a site you’re visiting to load into your browser, make sure you have the peace of mind that your site isn’t inflicting a similar experience onto your visitors and/or potential customers. The speed of an average site is not going to cost much to put right, and with more to lose than you stand to save, make sure your site isn’t being lapped by your competition…

There’s no requirement to understand everything that comes out of your web guru’s gob, but you need to make sure he’s not making up random terms to make himself look clever and justify all the money he’s charging you each month. Well, like the helpful chaps we are, we thought we’d put together a handy guide to the most common terms, words, phrases, and acronyms you’re likely to encounter when you kick off an SEO campaign. Not sure what SEO means? No worries, now you can look it up in our super-handy Glossary – what is: SEO. Think of our glossary as a handy little translation guide that you can refer to when the words your consultant is saying at you turn into one big blaaaaaah…

We think we’ve covered the important stuff, but if you hear a term that isn’t included in our glossary, don’t immediately sack your SEO company for lying and making up words; It may be we forgot to add it. Send us an email and we’ll gladly explain the term to you, and include it in our glossary.

So, without further ado – check out our super-handy, travel-sized, web-geek translation guide (or SEO Glossary, for short.)

If you’re in charge of marketing or advertising, knowing how best to use your budget on-line could be the deciding factor in whether you’re still in charge of marketing or advertising in a years time! Even if you employ an on-line marketing company to help you plot your way to success on the web, understanding which on-line tools can best achieve your goals gives you the peace of mind that you’re spending your time and money on the best route for your business. There are hundreds of social media sites and tools on the web for you to choose from, you couldn’t possibly use them all…

Of course, it will always boil down to setting on-line goals – but once you’ve done that, how do you know which tools best meet these goals?

Well, you owe CMO.com a big thanks – they’ve taken some of the main social tools that can be used in on-line promotion and created an easy-to-follow infographic which summarises what you can achieve with each tool: The CMO’s Guide to the Social Landscape. The infographic (below) gives a great overview of the strengths and weaknesses of social tools when used for on-line marketing campaigns. It’s also a fair indication of how the tools you use should reflect your on-line goals.

Here’s my summary of which tools to use for your on-line marketing campaigns

Well, it’s really my summary, of their summary:

• When you’re looking at having communications with your customers, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are the tools to use.

• If you’re looking to promote your brand around the web,Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Digg can all lead to great exposure.

• If you want to drive more traffic to your site, Digg and StumbleUpon are the tools you’re looking for.

• When you need some SEO magic sprinkled over your site, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us can all share some much needed link juice.

Of course, you also need to make sure that the actual campaign you’re running is suitable for the tools you use (which means making sure your campaign is suitable for your audience), or you’re wasting time, money, and potential customer’s eyeballs.

Make sure you check that the tools you’re using for your current web promotions, and be sure they’re meeting your on-line goals. If you’ve got no on-line goals, STOP! Make sure you know what you’re trying to achieve before you set out your master plan – your results will be far greater…

You can check out the infographic below – The Social Landscape Guide – or read the original post over on CMO.com, where there’s also a downloadable PDF you can, er, download.

It’s a short question with a big answer. I’d have to take a deep breath, make sure you’re sitting comfortably, and stock up on some custard creams rations just to work out where to start. It’s a complex beast, is Google. Processing 300,000,000 search terms a day without even breaking into sweat, it controls one of the most complicated ranking algorithms, and most up-to-date search index you could ever wish to meet.

There’s no easy answer when, after you’ve taught them the value of ranking well in the Search Engines, a client asks “How do I reach Number 1 in Google?”.  Normally, an answer of ‘with great difficulty’ is met with an un-trusting stare as the client takes the ‘I’m-going-to-get-charged-way-over-the-odds-here’ combat stance.

Thankfully, I don’t have to attempt to answer it in any kind of depth anymore, because if a client really want’s to know how Google works, the good guys over at PPC Blog have done a superb job of simplifying most of the process into a flow-chart-come-infographic:

Check out the full How Google Works graphic at the PPC Blog. The part about the data centers alone are fascinating.

If you’ve often wondered how much goes into that half-second search that Google does when you’re looking for something on the web, this gives you some idea. It also gives you some idea why a good SEO campaign is so valuable, and why if it comes cheap, there’s probably something missing (more than likely it’s the S, E, and O parts).

If your currently:

A) Starting a Google Adwords Campaign,

B) Thinking of spending money advertising stuff on-line,

C) Getting little value from a PPC campaign,

D) Wondering if it’s worth spending money advertising on Facebook,

Then this tool is well worth the 3-minutes of your time it takes to complete.

By asking a series of 10 questions, the tool is able to give you a likelihood of success for a Facebook advertising campaign. Although as with Google Adwords and other Pay-per-click campaigns, you only pay for the clicks your ads do get, there’s still an investment of time in setting-up, writing the text/designing the images, and testing your ads – If this is a waste of time for you, IsFaceBookForMe is quite blunt in it’s appraisal. That could save you a lot of wasted effort.

If it turns out encouragingly for your site’s budding relationship with Facebook users, you’ll benefit from Facebook’s insanely targeted campaigns – advertise by geographic location, occupation, keywords, in profiles, inside knee circumference (OK, maybe not that one, but it is frightening how much Facebook knows about us Humans…) I’m not suggesting you rush out and spend your hard-earned budget on Facebook Ads based on the opinion of a web page, but it does prove insightful as to the type of businesses that could succeed on Facebook.

If you’re in the business of SEO, Search Engine Marketing, PPC Campaigns, or the like, why not join me in a little game I’ve just created: How great am I at knowing if Facebook Ads might possibly be right for my client. (Disclaimer: It’s not as fun as it sounds).

Take the IsFaceBookForMe.com quiz, trying to anticipate which type of business would most benefit from running Ads on Facebook. The higher your score, the more you now about your clients’ best interests and Facebook’s role on the web. (for the sake of gloating, I scored a 9.2 out of 10 – Thank you, thank you, I accept your warm applause and admiration-filled glances…)

Of course, if you’re a client, you can always ask your SEO firm/web-guru to play my little game. If they haven’t heard of Facebook, didn’t know you could place PPC Ads on Facebook, or wouldn’t know how to submit a web form, Run. Run and spend your profit-dependent marketing budget elsewhere (hey, I’m free*)

Warning: If you’d like to play my new game, turn away now: I’m about to reveal what business qualities are best suited to a Facebook Ad campaign!

Facebook Ads could work well for you if:

• You sell to consumers, and not other businesses;
• You sell memberships, events, travel, training, or experiences;
• Your products or services are personalised;
• Your business is national (although you can target ads locally, too).

You’re probably wasting your time and energy if:

• You mostly sell directly to businesses;
• People can buy your products or services at the local supermarket;
• There’s no ‘story’ around your product or service;
• You think of Facebook as a virtual water-cooler for spotty adults who don’t leave the house much.

So, no you know. Go ask your SEO/local web hero if you should be running Facebook Ads.

(* If you’re in or around Hertfordshire, I’ll sing like a bird about what’s best for your business on-line in exchange for Coffee.)

Debating how many more clicks will you receive in position 2 compared to position 8 in the Search Engines?

Stayed awake at night pondering how you will celebrate a number 1 ranking in Google? (after all, you keep hearing about how great life is up there at the top)

Yeh, me too. Until I discovered some leaked data from AOL (courtesy of Techcrunch and some number crunching on SEO Scoop) which, after falling into some grateful SEOs hands, can shed some light onto how many clicks each link position in the Search Engine attract.

The data consists of some 9,000,000 + searches, so can be considered reasonably accurate. At worst, it gives us a fascinating insight into how powerful each of the top 10 search engines are at attracting clicks – only about 10% of searches resulted in leaving the first page, which means the top 10 results account for around 90% of all clicks within search results. Perhaps now you’re starting to realise why the best practitioners of SEO are in such high demand.

I’ve created a chart below to show you how each Search Engine ranking position performs for getting itself clicked:

Of course, factors such as how compelling your page title is, and how well written your meta descriptions are should also have an impact on the likelihood of your listing getting clicked, but this data does give us a fantastic starting point in valuing the #1 Position on Google and co.

SEOBook have a great article which analyzes how much a Google #1 position is worth , it looks at factors such as eye tracking, and click trends to bring some level of education to what always used to be pure guesswork.

I’ve put together a far less extensive formula for calculating what a #1 keyword position would be worth to your business, which you can read about in detail here: Why Ranking #1 in Google is Great for Business

If you’d just like to make use of my secret recipe, you’ll need:

1. The estimated traffic for your chosen keyword (there’s a whole host of tools to choose from)
2. The average value of each visitor to your site (you do know that, right?)
3. My formula, handily printed below…

So here goes:

(( Estimated traffic/100 ) * % of clicks from #1 position ) * Average Visitor Value = How much #1 ranking in Google is worth to you. Easy, huh?!

So, I’ll leave you with an example: ‘Credit cards’ is a term that’s searched for about 4,100,000 per month (according to Google’s traffic estimator). If we imagine (well, dream) we own a credit card web site where each customer is worth around 20p, a #2 position for ‘credit cards’ would be worth around £97,500, whereas #1 would be worth £344,400… over 3.5 more traffic/sales by getting from 2nd place to 1st place! Wow.

1st – ((4,100,000/100) * 42 ) * 0.20) = £344,400

2nd – ((4,100,00/100) * 11.9) * 0.20) = £97,500

Well, having your content shared on Facebook is very simple thanks to the “Like” button.

Typepad users are reporting a 50% increase in referral traffic since installing Facebook ‘Like’ buttons to their blogs, so say Typepad on their blog. Bloggers who use Typepad as the blogging tool of choice can easily add the ‘Like’ button to their posts, the footer, or the sidebar of their blogs, and adding the “Like” button has seen traffic soar:

When we introduced Facebook Like for the blog sidebar, allowing any reader from Facebook to “Like” your blog and receive post updates directly in their news streams, over 1500 bloggers installed the widget leading to an overall 50% increase of referral traffic from Facebook to all TypePad blogs. This is, as we say, a good thing.

The Facebook Like button allows your readers to “like” your content, which shares a link and the title of your post in their Facebook news feed, which is then seen by all their friends. Of course, if you don’t produce great content that people find useful, people won’t particularly want to share it. It’s not a magic solution, but it can be a great way of spreading your content to a wider audience.

“Hey, I’d love to have a like button, do I need to use Typepad?” Fear not – Facebook allows any developer to add “Like buttons” to web sites and blogs. If you are a wordpress user, it’s even easier: a free plugin – Like – is available to download that adds Facebook’s like feature to your blog.

Let us know if Facebook’s “like” button has increased traffic to your blog, or if you’re thinking of adding one.