Whether you’re looking at promoting a services or products driven site, SEO (that’s the honest-to-good professional white SEO stuff, not that black hat or amateur-”I did SEO once” type of stuff), can provide up to 250% greater return on investment than online media buying, PPC, PR, or direct mail. Now you know.

Indeed, there could be a whole host of reasons why nobody reads (or cares) about your newsletter, but making sure you’ve got the basics in place to deliver a compelling newsletter to potential or existing customers is a must. Take a look at their post and make sure you’re not guilty of any of these mistakes:

1. Your newsletter isn’t helpful
2. Your newsletter has no voice (or personality)
3. Your newsletter doesn’t tell stories
4. Your newsletter has a weak call to action
5. Your newsletter has no frequency

If you’re expecting someone to read your email newsletter each month, make sure you’re not committing more than 1 of the mistakes above. If you are, it could well explain that nagging feeling every time you hit send…

These scammy spammy scummy companies that bloat inboxes and suck the time out of your busy day also damage the reputation of our business as a whole and mean we good guys need to begin any SEO conversation almost with an apology for our wayward brethren who follow the dark side. There now follows a case in point.

A case in point

About a month ago, Adam and I had a stand at a business exhibition. During set up, I wandered across to speak to another exhibitor. Because I’m nice that way.

We swapped a smile and a handshake. Then I told him what bpodr did. Talk about a change in the weather. It suddenly went very cold, followed by a storm front moving up from the east. I was then subjected to a series of epithets and accusations. The tamest of these was ‘pest’. I retreated with no opportunity to protest my innocence.

From the body of his rant I was able to deduce that the root cause of all this bitterness and bile was a prolonged exposure to the constant hassle of unscrupulous SEO leeches. In such a situation, retreat is really the only option: to stand and debate from a position of weakness looks like begging and can only serve to undermine your whole case.

Thanks, scummy spammy, SEO scammers.

There’s bad SEO companies and there’s BAD SEO

There’s another sense of in which an SEO company can be the good guys, however. Good in the sense of actually knowing what they’re doing.

The spammy life-suckers that pass for SEO companies fall into one of three categories:

1. Pure Scam – they take the money and do nothing
2. Black Hat – they take your money, do some shady things that improve your rankings and traffic for a while, then disappear as your site is penalised by Google
3. Useless – they take your money and they do some stuff that actually causes your site to lose traffic and rankings

The common thread, of course, is that you’ve spent money and your site is worse off than before – just like your bank account. The Useless may be ethical – but with no idea of SEO and no idea how to attract clients, hence the spammy emails and calls – but in the end they’re not doing SEO.

Rae Hoffman has a great post about a useless SEO company that were probably less ethical than they should/could have been. The point, though, is that they were marketing themselves as SEO experts when what they knew was a fraction of the stuff they needed to know. Go read the post – go on – whether you work in SEO or are a business employing an SEO company. It has some real cringe moments and Rae’s conclusion is pretty sensible: do some research and due diligence before parting with cash for SEO work.

For another take on the issue, try this brief comic strip from Ranked Hard.

Is it time to say ‘bye bye’ to the name SEO?

Perhaps it’s time to come up with a new name for what we do. Something that better describes what the good guys do. How about LMB? Land More Business. Seems a shame, though, just as more and more people are familiar with the term.

The important thing to remember is that SEO is a convenient hook on which to hang a whole raft of services that can bring benefit to a business. The ethical but useless SEO companies seem to be focused on only one thing – the way your site is coded. That’s like planning to win the World Cup by putting all the training into making sure the team can tie their boot laces in a double knot.

Anyway, when you get that email or call offering you miracle LMB services, remember you saw the term here first.

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…

I was going to create a fantastic infographic about facebook‘s rate of growth, it’s virtual population size compared to some of our biggest countries, and some big yellow images about how many new users are signing up per day, but, Pingdom had beaten me to it with a great infographic celebrating facebook’s 400 millionth user back at the start of February. Not being one to reinvent wheels (plus Pingdom’s infographic was a damn sight sexier than any effort I might produce), I decided to, ahem, ‘update’ their infographic myself…

So, there you have it. 500,000,000 people worldwide now use facebook – are they talking about your business or service?

BONUS: 10 fun facts about facebook, courtesy of mashable.

Links are an essential currency online. the more you have, the higher you rank. But how do you get links? Link Baiting is a technique that can help.

Link Baiting is the process of creating content for your site that stands a good chance of attracting links from other sites. It’s hard work going ‘door-to-door’ for links: knocking down site owner’s doors, asking nicely for links is arduous and it takes a long time (and a lot of effort) if you’d like hundreds or thousands of links. Putting that effort into creating content which attracts links all by itself is much smarter. Your content acts like ‘bait’. That’s Link Bait.

Not just any old content makes great link bait, though. Content that attracts links from other site owners, bloggers, publishers, and so on, has to be compelling, interesting, useful, funny, informative, or all of these things (this post doesn’t lay claim to be any of those things – I deliberately left badly written off the list). Link Bait content has to be great.

Why should I care about great content?

Great content attracts links (didn’t you read what I said just know?). Links equal better rankings, which equals more traffic. This is why great sites care about producing great content, and why you should too.

Just take a look and see how great content can act as link bait:

Infographic courtesy of Elliance – Power of Link Baiting Infographic

What types of content could I use as Link Bait?

What types of content would your customers enjoy or find useful?  What would you enjoy writing about, talking about, or singing about? Use that type of content. It could be an article, a rant, a video, a full blown west-end musical. But it has to be amusing, interesting or useful.

Infographic courtesy of Elliance – Type of Link Bait Infographic

Link baiting is a very important part of building an online presence that works. There are a huge variety and type of content that can be used, the infographics above are a prime example – I thought they would be interesting and informative, so I’ve displayed them on my site, with a link back to the source site. You could choose to sing, dance, write, or tap-dance to create great content – it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s remarkable to some of your audience.

[I've added Link Baiting to the bpodr SEO glossary]

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.)