Those of you who are paying attention will remember our quick and easy guide to link baiting – it was quick, and fairly easy, but didn’t really roll it’s sleeves up and tell you the types of content you might consider creating for link-baiting. Fret not, Econsultancy have published 15 types of content for link-baiting, which is well worth a read if you’re responsible for creating content for a web site.

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…

Last week I wrote how site speed was starting to play a greater role in Google Rankings. I wrestled with myself a little over whether or not to publish that post because I knew that the bpodr site wasn’t as well optimised for speed as it could have been (WARNING: Low flying excuses incoming…) The site had only recently been re-launched under tight timescales, we have a lot of client work on at the moment, and the page speed of bpodr.co.uk wasn’t as important as getting the site up-and-running, and publishing useful content. However, the speed of a website is important, and this website is no different.

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…

What is Link Baiting?

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]

Back in the old days of the web (when everything was in black and white, and scrolling, blinking text was all the rage), use of graphics were deliberately kept to a minimum. Us web designers dare not risk including too many images on a web page for fear of the visitor having to wait 40 minutes while their 56k dial-up modem chocked and spluttered through the task of loading the page. Oh, how things change; the occasional animated gif has been replaced by high definition streaming video, and the occasional text hover colour change has been relegated to an amateur laughing stock, with javascript-driven slides, fades, drags, drops, and fireworks adding the glamour to today’s sites.

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…

If you’re wondering whether the PPC your SEO consultant has recommended is a marketing term or a type of swim-related strain injury, we’ve got just the thing for you: Our new SEO Glossary – written in Plain English.

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.)

“How Does Google Work?”

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).

Wondering how likely an Internet user is to click your site link when it’s placed 3rd in Google?

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

If you haven’t looked at your site lately, has anyone else?

If you don’t know if anyone has looked at your site, it may be time to conduct a site audit. At the very least, it’s clear you need to get some sort of analytics installed, so you can be sure that you’re not the only one ignoring your site.

This assumes, of course, that your site is part of your marketing arsenal and plays a significant part in meeting your business objectives. If your site is simply there to add to the approximately 21 billion web pages in English and to serve no business function whatsoever, please ignore the rest of this post.

What is a site audit?

In its most simple terms, a site audit ensures that your site is fit for purpose. And ‘purpose’ here means its ability to attract qualified visitors/prospects – and convert them to customers or leads.

Why bother?

If your site was built with no optimization included as part of the design process, a careful audit will lay the groundwork for creating an optimization strategy. Even if your site was optimized during the build, there’s every chance that search engine technology, your customers, or your business goals have changed. An audit can still point out areas that could be improved to meet those changes.

A series of posts – yippee!

Over the next few weeks, I’ll cover some of the things to look at when performing a site audit. This is all stuff you can do for yourself, with a little help from on-line resources and free (or cheap) tools. The results may surprise (or dismay) you. Either way, you’ll learn something about optimizing sites and bringing your web site in line with your business strategy.

With a bit of luck, you may even start reaping the benefits of increased traffic and higher search engine rankings. But don’t hold me to that.

Some people arrive at your site, take one short look, and click away. These brief visits get swept up by your analytics software into a general percentage known as your site’s ‘bounce rate’. Think of it like a woman shopping for clothes. She picks items off a rail one by one and turns to show them to her friend. When her friend shakes her head, she replaces the item on the rail. That’s a bounce.

In Google Analytics terms, a bounce is simply a visit that comprises one page of your site. In practical terms, this usually means that there is nothing there that matches what the visitor was hoping to find. This may or may not be something you should be concerned about.

If you’ve done a lot of good SEO work on your site and it’s sitting high in the search rankings, it’s inevitable that a number of visitors will simply click the link with no thought. They arrive at the site, see it’s not what they’re looking for, and off they go. This is not a problem and you can probably discount somewhere in the region of a 30% bounce rate as traffic you’ll never be able to convert, no matter what improvements you make to your site. This is like the woman is the example above realising that she’s come to a bridal store instead of a boutique that specialises in ball gowns. The dresses are beautiful and of high quality; they’re just not what this customer needs.

Big bounces are only fun on a trampoline

If your bounce rate is creeping towards the 50% range and upwards, however, it may be time to worry.

For starters, a high bounce rate is a sure indication that the traffic coming to your site is not as qualified as it should be. That gives you an immediate insight into the quality of your marketing campaigns, whether they’re off-line advertising, sponsored links, or even the keywords you’re using for increasing your organic rankings.

If, after careful analysis of the traffic sources, you’re sure they are qualified, you now know that the site itself is failing to meet the promises delivered implicitly in the marketing campaign. People have been enticed to visit and still found nothing to engage them. This is especially the case where you have specific landing pages for different campaigns.

Bounce rate, therefore, can be an extremely useful metric. Even the most cursory examination of the numbers can point out some quick wins for campaign changes and amendments to site copy and/or design.