Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Hosting on Apr 28, 2010
If you keep up to date with the goings on in the SEO world you will have read about Google’s recent announcement regarding their inclusion of page load times in to their search ranking factors. With a lot of companies jumping on the bandwagon to use this to sell their services I wanted to address what this means to your website and what you can do to make improvements.
The full announcement from Google can be found here is well worth a read http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html. In summary the key points to take home are:
- Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests
- While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page
- Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point
To see how your site is performing and to get a list of recommended changes I would start with looking at “Site Performance” within the Labs section of your Google Webmaster Tools. As you can see one of my own websites is incredibly slow (thanks to multiple JS and CSS files plus a few resource heavy WordPress plug-ins) and needs dome serious attention!
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Apr 28, 2010
Modern cars are incredibly difficult to break in to and steal, so much so that thieves often find it easier to break in to a house and steal the car keys to make off with it. Hackers targeting your website are faced with a similar problem when it comes to getting access to your website.
Few hackers target the web host directly, with all the money large web hosts such as ourselves spend on security and monitoring it is simply too difficult to gain access. Instead they go directly after the webmaster by downloading a virus on to their PC and getting the FTP log in details so often stored as an unprotected flat text file within software such as Filezilla.
What do they do with the information?
Once they have direct access to your website’s files they are any number of actions they can take:
- Insert links in to your site & create link farms
- Capture your member’s information
- Links to malware
- Spread viruses
- Destroy your site
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Web Design on Apr 13, 2010
There are a select group of WordPress plug-ins & widgets I go about installing as soon as I have set up WordPress, sometimes even before I have activated my theme of choice. In no particular order, below are the plug-ins & widgets I install within the first 24 hours without fail and think you should too…
Contact Form 7
Have your site’s visitors send secure messages to your email inbox with out exposing your email address.
Posted by: Che Cooper
in Your Business on Apr 13, 2010
Directory submission
Directories are not an effective method to build quality incoming links but they will build volume and are a good way to get the ball rolling. Most will have a low Page Rank and pass very little link juice on, but when added all together, it could be enough to get you up to PR1. Rather than try to submit to each one manually it is quicker and just as effective to use a bulk submission service. A quick search for “directory submission” will bring you back a list of potential suppliers. If you know of directories that deal specifically with your niche, make sure you manually submit your site to these as well to build relevant incoming links.
Twitter
Make it easy for your visitors to retweet your website/ articles with a retweet button. Also set up your own account to push news items, blog articles, and special offers to engage with your site’s users on a one to one level. Twitter exclusive offers or resources are a good way to build your follower base quickly.
Social bookmarking
Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Reddit, Sphinn, Design Bump… there are dozens and dozens of social bookmarking sites, some broad others targeting specific niches, and they have the potential to be major traffic drivers for your website. Submit your site yourself and provide visitors with the ability to submit directly from your website as well.
