Tag Archives: open-source

Google Officially Counts Site Speed for Web Search Ranking

Posted on by
Reply

Google has just officially announced that website speed is now a new signal when it considers web search ranking. Although not too much weight is given to site speed, still Google encourages website owners to consider implementing site speed booster to make their websites rank higher on Google search. This however applies only to Google.com. And site speed is defined by Google as the speed by which websites responde to web requests.   Google also gave two major reasons why site speed is important – it improves user experience and satisfaction when visiting websites and it reduces operating costs. In determining site speed of a websites it ranks, Google uses various methods and sources. What are those specifically remains secret though. To evaluate the speed of your site, you can use the following tools, as suggested by the Google Webmaster Central Blog : Page Speed , an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement. YSlow , a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed. WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist. In  Webmaster Tools , Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about  site performance .   Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Officially Counts Site Speed for Web Search

An Unconventional Way to Choose Hosting

Posted on by
Reply

Choosing a hosting provider can be a big hassle. The first time I started paying for hosting was close to ten years ago and since then I have gone through a lot of hosts. And to tell you the truth, up until this year, I just picked the cheapest I could find with the features I needed. I had already gone through learning SEO to make money online and then PHP to make the SEO more effective. I did not want to have to learn one more thing that was better left to someone else. But this year, Google came one step closer to providing the type of search engine results people want. And they don’t want your slow as molasses website. I know I don’t. You get about a two count and then I am back at Google looking for the next result. I still have the habit beat into me during phone modem times of opening two or three results in new tabs and letting the quickest one win. So the people at Google decided why not make that part of their ranking algorithm. And I decided, time to look at hosting again. Hosting can be your weakest link when it comes to the load time of your website. I have seen a lot of emphasis placed on shrinking images, tidying CSS and javascript and compressing web files when the fact of the matter is that you are only shaving milliseconds doing this and every little bit does help, but when the load time of a web page is in the multiple seconds, you are just wasting your time. You need to look at optimizing Apache, PHP and MySql. It is the only place you are going to shave whole seconds off. I have seen 3-5 seconds shaved off the load time of a WordPress page with just a few MySql tweaks and PHP caching. Once you can load a web page in one or two seconds, then is the time you starting compressing files and images. I now can say I have developed sites on shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting and I even played around a bit with cloud servers, but I don’t categorize hosting providers that way. I have a different method. If you are a hosting company and your company does not fall under one of these categories, I am sorry I did not list your type. I just have run into another category personally. The Unlimited Domains and Email Addresses