Traffic Flow SEO

I have been looking for website or web page load time checker to make sure my pages were not taking to long to load as this is now a very important factor in your Google AdWords campaigns quality scores. While looking I found this incredible tool that not only provides the load time data it also gives me indepth knowledge of what components or code that may or may not be slowing up the overall load time and breaks it out into an easy to read graph.

Here is the official details as described on the their website:

About SiteTimer

Web Monitor allows you to monitor how long it takes for a user to download one or more of your web site pages.

It visits the page that your request and downloads all content that's directly linked from that page;

* Images
* Frames
* IFrames
* Script files
* It follows redirects

As the pages are downloaded, SiteTimer stores statistics on how long time each item takes to download, and how much data they contained. This information is then presented in a grid.

Web Monitor correctly handles http compressed material (see OctaGate Switch), and it also honors keep-alive requests to give an accurate indication of the times a real browser would spend downloading the content.
Optimizing your site

Your page shouldn't take too long to load, slow load speeds will lead to users leaving your pages even though they're interested in the material. Users are becoming less and less accepting when it comes to slow sites as internet maturity increases.

The size of the page is the main deciding factor for download times, coupled with bandwidth. Though you can influence the bandwidth of your webservers, you cannot influence the bandwidth of your users. So make sure that your pages are no larger than they need to be. To reduce the size of your pages, you can;

Decrease the size of your images:

* Use JPG instead of GIF or BMP. Sometimes PNG files are smaller than JPG files
* Use harder compression on your jpg images
* Make the images smaller in size
* Reduce the number of images
* Use HTTP compression on your web servers, which may compress code/text by up to 90%

If the first part of your page loads fast, and the parts that aren't visible yet take longer, than that's ok, because the users don't care about information that they're not ready to look at yet.
Reasons for slow load speeds

Pages can be slow to load for a number of reasons;

* As mentioned above, the pages are simply too large
* Your bandwidth is insufficient for the load that the users place on the page, in which case you'll need to upgrade your internet connection or migrate to a data center.
* Your servers are overloaded and can't cope with the load that's placed on them, even though there's bandwidth to spare. In this case, you'll need to invest in more or better hardware. You may also want to look into load balancing.
* Your users have low bandwidth - not all users have broadband, and even if they do, they may be located somewhere where internet connectivity is bad. Your only option here is to reduce the size of your page. Additionally, users may be on mobile devices such as cell phones, which have low bandwidth compared to broadband connections.

Check it out today for FREE at - OctaGate Site Timer

Just started to notice Yahoo breaking away from its sister search engines, AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Since they all use the same master database to identify pages indexed and backlinks found for any particular site you would usually find very similiar numbers across all of these engines. So, for example, if you had 10,000 backlinks to your site all three engines would usually present that data give or take 10%, but now I am starting to see Yahoo break away and show drastically different results. I just tested Discover Directory (www.discoverdirectory.com) and found a big discrepency. For reference when I checked my backlinks (link popularity) today (Monday October 27th) here is what I found (as per AskMe backlink checker).


Discover Directory Backlinks:
AllTheWeb 3,160
Altavista 3,240
Yahoo 8,778

You will notice the big difference between Yahoo and AlltheWeb and AltaVista. What does this mean? Well, with limited resources it appears that Yahoo is starting to focus its attention on its own search engine (as also obvious from its new search only marketing campaign) and is letting some of its smaller properties fade away. Will these engines be turned off? Most likely not because Yahoo has a way of keeping anything alive that generates ANY positive cashflow (i.e. Search Submit Pro/Paid Inclusion, Yahoo Directory, etc.) even if the search industry has moved past these technologies.

I am not a big fan of most of the online keyword ranking services, but ExactFactor is different. It has a great interface that is very easy to use and even provides email alerts as changes happen within your rankings. The service covers Google, Yahoo and MSN and also will track competing sites positioning relative to your website.

Currently the service if free as stated on the website, but I am sure that a more robust version that includes additional services will be avaialbe soon for some additional monthly amount.

Check it out today at - ExactFactor

I just upgraded my AT&T DSL Internet service from 1.5MB to 3.0MB only to find I am still running at around 1.5MB. As I was testing my connection I thought I might share my favorite site for speed testing for all to use (if you haven't already have been lucky enough to find it on your own) - Speedtest.net

From it's absolutely incredible Flash interface it not only provides the coolest dashboard, it is also one of the most robust tools of its type allowing you to:
- Download/upload your stats
- Compare your country or global rank
- Keep your history online for later review or comparison
- Global stats for almost any area down to the city for comparison of performance between service provides.

Check it out today at - Speedtest.net

Just found a great little free online article spinner. The site is not much to look at and all the data I can gather about it is summed up below (as copied from the site):

This Free Article Spinner is a small weekend project. I am learning affiliate marketing, which sometimes require submitting articles. Article spinner is a great help. This kind of software basically replaces words with their synonyms. As cheap as I am, I have been looking for a real free article spinner, and have trouble finding one. So I decided to write my own.

Check it out here - FREE ARTICLE SPINNER

Just saw an interesting article on CNET about the upcoming deadline looming next week for federal antitrust regulators to approve or challenge Yahoo and Google's controversial search advertising partnership, the search giant has apparently been busy trying to drum up large advertisers to provide public testimonials in support of the deal, according to a report in TechCrunch.

Let me make this perfectly clear - THIS IS NOT A GOOD PARTNERSHIP! Usually I am pretty open-minded and am willing to understand and see both sides of an issue, but in this case there really is only one side. If Yahoo and Google go through with this partnership here is what I see:

- Increased prices for Yahoo ads - one of the main reasons Yahoo gets part of my ad budgets is because its lower costs offset some of my higher priced Google ads - have to use Google for volume.

- Less insight into my ad performance - Google does not share separate performance levels of search partner sites, it just rolls it all up together, so you will no longer have a clear picture on how your Yahoo ads are performing as they have a slightly different search audience.

- Google will no longer have a large search competitor and may not have the incentive to continually update their engine at the current rate and it will become harder to have any discussions with Google over their lack of relevancy within their paid search algorithm since they will really be the only game in town.

The best solution, which I originally did not embrace would be for MSN and Yahoo to merge and/or for Yahoo to buy AOL. So, if you are approached by Google as seen in the TechCrunch article I hope you just say 'no'.

Keyword research is difficult, so why make it harder with difficult to use and mostly inaccurate tools. There are so many keyword research tools on the web that are really just worthless, they track only a minimal amount of keywords and have very questionable sources of data. There are just a few that really shine and provide real insight and ease of use while providing accurate data from reliable sources.

While I love Keyword Discovery, I have to tell you Wordpot is my new next favorite keyword research tool (replacing Wordtracker). It is absolutely incredible and easy to use (and understand). There free version offers a lot of value for those who just want to test it out and the paid version provides a lot of extras.

Check it out today at - Wordpot

Content is king on the Internet and that is especially true when it comes to the way search engines value a website. If that website has a lot of content, that content is updated often and that content is unique, then a website has a great chance of ranking well within the engines as it is considered a valuable resources.

While it may not be easy to create content and it may not be easy to update that content, you definitely do not want someone stealing that unique content you worked so hard for in order to prop up their own website. What may happen is that Google might index the other site before yours and they will get the credit for originating that content and all the search engine goodwill that comes with it.

So, you say, what is a webmaster to do? Well you can scour the Internet for years looking for copied content or you can use a service like Copyscape to track down offenders quickly and easily.

Chedk out the FREE version of Copyscape here - Copyscape Website

Ask has always struggled to get more marketshare. First they ditched their trusty mascot, Jeeves (retiring him in 2006). Then they moved into Ask 3D (early universal search - way ahead of the competition) which was incredible for the time. During that time they ran ads that ranged from chimps using the engine (maybe a bad association of its users) saying it was very simple, to a short run campaign called, "Its the Algorithm" which I think very few people really understood to crazy ads that covered equally crazy subjects. Below are a few of my favorites for your enjoyment:





Rescent research (via comsScore) has shown that people really still think of Ask as the engine you go to, to ask questions. Well it appears what is old is new again. Ask.com (as of today) is going to focus on this audience and have recently updated their site to reflect that (US - October 6 / UK October 20) change. While I think that may be a great idea, what I am saddened to see is their abandonment of many things I liked about Ask. I really enjoyed their Ask 3D search results as I thought they were much more advanced than any universal search results coming from any other engine. Below is a commercial that really shows those advanced search results (as they are no longer on the site):



What I am seeing now is still a good search engine, but with the focus now on answering questions the search results are starting reflect that and look more and more like Google results (integrating the universal search results within results, not next to them). What they lose here are the users who really enjoyed that benefit. They could have included their new Q/A results next to their search results without losing most of what Ask 3D included and held on to users like myself - just my 2 cents.

For more on what is new click here - Welcome to the New Ask.com

I just stumbled upon W3Optimizer and quickly come to love it. It is a great tool to get a high-level on-site SEO review of your webpage. While I have other tools that do the same thing (i.e. WebCEO and others) this one is online and free. It includes reviews of the:

- File name
- Page title
- Meta Refresh
- Meta Keywords
- Meta Description
- Headline (H1 tags)
- Keyword Density on the Page

In addition, they offer an interesting button you can put on your site that reveals your on-site ranking as per W3Optimizer.

Check it out here - W3Optimizer website link

Just got an email with Best of the Web's (BOTW) promo discount code for 20% off any of their services in October including:

* Directory Submissions - Discount on both the annually recurring and/or the one-time review fee.
* Blog Directory Submissions - Save on the one-time review fee for blogs.
* Monthly Sponsorship Ads - Save on the monthly rate for all new sponsorship ads.
* Blog Advertising - Discount on all new sponsorship ads in the Blog Directory.
* Local Premium Listings – Save on the already low monthly cost.
* Sponsored Local Listings – Maximum exposure at a great monthly discount.

The promo code you use at checkout is: ZOMBIE

Click here to get started - Best of the Web 20% Off Discount Link

Recently Google changed their guidelines in reference to web directories, especially the Yahoo! Directory and the DMOZ (or Open Directory). These directories have long held a lot of credibility with Google (Google even uses the DMOZ data for its own directory - Google Directory - just reorganizes it based on PageRank), but recently they appear to have lost that credibility. Google has updated the copy within their Webmaster Guidelines.

Below is the before and after as to how the text read and now reads:

Used to say:

* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.co.uk/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to
increase our coverage of your web pages.
* Make sure that all the sites that should know about your pages
are aware that your site is online.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open
Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Now says:

When your site is ready:
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are
aware your site is online.

The interesting part is that on a recent posting in Google Groups - Google Webmaster Help that John Mueller (from Google) posted a reply to this change. His response as to why it was changed is below:

I wouldn't necessarily assume that we're devaluing Yahoo's links, I
just think it's not one of the things we really need to recommend. If
people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors
(I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it's obviously fine to get
listed there. It's not something that people have to do though :-).

What do you think - does it make sense? :-)

What else should we change / add / remove?

John

In addition, he later posted to the same thread:

This line was removed because we feel that you should not "force"
other sites to link to yours. Obviously it's good that sites link to
each other, it's fine to encourage that on your sites to link out and
to make it easy for them to link to yours. However, I don't think we
need to make it a part of the guidelines that you should "have other
sites link to yours" -- they should be willing to do that on their
own, it should be their decision not yours.

I hope that makes sense.

John

What does all this mean? Well, it basically boils down to the idea that web directories still have SEO value, but Google is slowly distancing themselves from them as a quality back link source. When will this happen? The reality is that it will not happen anytime in the near future and is really just a long-term strategy for Google. So until then - keep submitting.

Accoona started out in the search marketplace in 2004 with a boom and a lot of promise. Heck, they even had Bill Clinton as their pitchman for the new engine. Today when I went to visit the engine I saw this notice (may have been up for awhile as I don;t visit all that often):

Dear Accoona search users,

Due to an overwhelmingly competitive search market, Accoona.com and Accoona.cn will no longer be active.

We thank you for your previous support.

Sincerely,

Accoona Management

This news saddens me as I believe we need more competition in the search space as Google becomes more and more dominant. While I do not believe that any single upstart search engine may beat Google in the in the near future, I do believe that some of the larger players (i.e. Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com) could acquire these smaller engines and integrate their best technologies and add their smaller market shares to increase the overall market share of the larger engine.

Not that Accoona ever achieved that much marketshare, it is just representative of a larger trend of search engines with a lot of potential, like WiseNut becoming a casualty in the search engine wars.

To check out Accoona's final goodbye visit the site here - Accoona