The time it takes to load a page has always had a big impact on how visitors navigate around your website, and more crucially, how long they stay on your website. 2010 will be a turning point for your website if it loads slowly.

Visitors won’t endure slow loading pages anymore

In 2006, Akamai commissioned Jupiter Research who interviewed over 1,000 internet users and produced a report entitled “Customer Reaction to a Poor Online Shopping Experience“. The main takeaway from the report was that the average time a visitor would be prepared to wait for a website to load was 4 seconds – any longer than that, would see potential customers abandoning the website and going elsewhere.

Akamai again commissioned a report which was published in September 2009 with the objectives of understanding how customer expectations to online shopping have evolved.  The results were astounding – the average time a user would be prepared to wait in 2009, has halved to only 2 seconds!

Source: Every Second Counts: How Website Performance Impacts Shopper Behaviour – www.getelastic.com

Wow – 2 Seconds! Does your Homepage load in 2 seconds?

The respondents in the Akamai Report stated that website load time is second only to high prices on a customer’s list of pet hates.

Have you spent all that time and money making your E-Commerce website look as exciting as possible, featuring products with competitive pricing on a website that has been conversion optimised, only to find out that your customers are leaving without buying because you haven’t put the time into making your page load any quicker…?

It has been proven that you can increase your conversion rates and decrease your bounce rate simply by moving all your javascript externally, building your website with CSS, Gzipping, removing whitespace and utilising low latency server architecture. Why not fix this today?

Page Speed as a factor for Organic Search Engine Rankings?

This is where page speed will get interesting in 2010!

Yahoo recently filed a patent that explores the ways a search engine considers the time it takes pages to render, for example how quickly that page is loaded directly after clicking on a natural listing from a search engine. Basically they’re hinting towards the fact that those sites that are the quickest to load will get a boost in the organic rankings.

Since that patent was launched, Matt Cutts (Google’s head of Web Spam) has been interviewed and he said that Page Speed will be a part of the Google algorithm (if it’s not already). We have known for a while that Page Speed has been a part of Quality Score in Adwords, and we should start to see it making a difference when Caffeine starts to go live on the rest of Google’s data centres in early 2010.

Here’s what Matt had to say:

Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Just this morning, Google blogged about released an experimental tool in Google Webmaster Tools called Site Performance. It takes the aggregated data from Google Toolbar regarding actual page load times, example pages, and more interestingly how your site compares to other sites. Although it’s still in labs, it is an interesting development and indicates where SEO is moving towards.

Finally, Microsoft’s Patrick Harris mentions Page Speed as the most important on-page factor to focus on for SEO in the recent webcast “Search Engines: War Stories from the World Tour” (Dec 1 webcast, 6:50 in the video).

As we can see, in more ways that one, the speed at which your website loads should be a major concern to you in the next decade…

How can you improve your Page Speed?

Other than the Google’s new Site Performance feature in Webmaster Tools, there are plenty of tools available to help you monitor and improve your page load speed:

www.WebPageTest.org

WebPageTest is an online tool to show you what parts of your site take the time to download. It provides a useful waterfall feature to give you a visual pinpoint as to exactly where the bottlenecks are.

Google Page Speed

Google have released their Page Speed Firefox plugin (also need to install Firebug, but both tools are extremely useful). This is similar to WebPageTest but you need Firefox and Firebug to be able to use it. It also provides a useful timeline of how your page renders.

Google Closure

An interesting add-on to Google Page Speed is called Google Closure. This plugin can compile all your Javascript into compact, high performance code. It basically checks and optimises your code which helps to make code that is cleaner and easier to maintain.

Recently I came across a website called EverZing, developers of software that can index spoken words. I was very excited about this sort of technology and immediately though about how terrific this would be for SEO.

Many websites are using videos and audio clips (podcasts) more and more, but they do not seem to inherit any credit from search engines for the unique content embedded within this streaming media. I’m not talking about Google Universal Search. Rather, I’m referring to the text version of spoken words within audio files.

When one searches for a keyphrase that was heard on a video or in a song on the radio, and would like to find the source online, then it is very difficult or sometimes impossible to find it. That’s because search engines can (not yet) turn audio into text effectively, at least not yet on a mass scale.

So there is a lot of value “locked away” in sound bits and video files, because users cannot search for relevant content that is hidden within a podcast or audio recording.

Audio indexing can solve this sort of issue and give websites with podcasts, videos or audio a major boost on search engine results pages (SERPs). Current search technology only allows users to search for video and audio files based on titles and descriptions. That’s quite primitive, is it not?

“Software as a Service” (SaaS) solutions such as EveryZing make it possible for media to become discoverable. Content is extracted from the media asset  (video or audio) and can then be published as text, allowing search engines to crawl and index the content. – Just imagine how many websites could publish so much new content much more frequently!

Google Audio Indexing – Good for SEO?

Browsing through Google Labs, I came across another audio indexing project called Google Audio Indexing (short GAUDI), which is even able to directly crawl video and audio using speech recognition technology. GAUDI functions just like Googlebot, which crawls text content on a website without the use of manual “pre-indexing” solutions such as EveryZing.

However, at this stage GAUDI searches only those videos uploaded on the YouTube political channels. I am looking forward to seeing the impact of “Big Brother Google” once this starts to index audio from all websites on web, and the output is fed into the main Google index.

In the meantime I will continue testing upcoming audio text publishing solutions and how these can be used for search engine optimisation purposes, and of course I will also keep my eye on Google’s Audio Indexing project as well.

A few weeks ago I arrived at my desk in the morning, when a colleague said “Have you heard of the Caffeine update?” – Jolly, I thought sarcastically, they finally fixed the coffee machine. I quickly enquired to hear more about Google’s latest algorithm update and have been on a quest to research Caffeine ever since!

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You know those annoying people who keep telling the same tired stories every opportunity they get? – It gets old pretty fast doesn’t it..?

Search engines feel much the same way about websites that contain duplicate content.

There are many different reasons why a website might contain multiple copies of the same content:

On many websites it is possible to reach the same page with different URLs. For example, all four of these addresses may display the same html file:

• http://www.example.com/
• http://example.com/
• http://www.example.com/index.html
• http://example.com/index.html

Many content management systems (CMS) and blog software packages publish pages in such a way that the same content can be reached in multiple ways. For example a new blog post may be available on:

• Main blog page: http://www.example.com/blog/
• One or more category pages: http://www.example.com/blog/category/tips/ and http://www.example.com/blog/category/articles/
• In a date based archive: http://www.example.com/blog/2009/09/
• As a permalink: http://www.example.com/blog/car-maintenance-101/

In an e-commerce website, the same product may be available in multiple different categories e.g. http://www.example.com/books/children/twilight/ and http://www.example.com/books/fiction/twilight/, or in some cases there may be very similar products with almost identical descriptions – such as clothes that come in different sizes or colours.

Some websites put session IDs in their URLs to help them track individual visitors as they move through the website. An unfortunate side effect of this is that every time a search engine spider visits the site, it will see a new unique URL for each page.

If your website is hosted on a UNIX/Linux environment, then its URLs are case sensitive, but if it is hosted on Windows, then http://www.example.com/TEST.html and http://www.example.com/test.html will both load the same page. However, the search engines would consider these to be two separate URLs that contain duplicate content.

Or on a less legitimate note, the content could have been stolen (or scraped) from another website.

So why is this a problem for you as a website owner?

Well there are two main issues as far as SEO is concerned: Links pointing to your website may be spread across different possible URLs, thus diluting the link popularity of each web page, which moves these pages further away from top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Search engines don’t really want to have to store multiple copies of the same content, so they might decide to only store one version (and it may not be the version you would prefer), or they may decide not to bother storing it at all.

So what can you as a website owner do to prevent or at least reduce this problem?

Be consistent with how you link within your website, don’t mix and match different versions of URLs that load the same page.

Google Webmaster Tools gives you the option to tell Google if you prefer the http://www.example.com or the http://example.com version of your domain name.

Some forms of duplicate content can be completely eliminated by setting up 301 redirects so that whenever someone tries to access one form of a URL (such as http://example.com) they are automatically redirected to your preferred version (such as http://www.example.com).

If you can’t eliminate the duplicate content, then you need to have some way of either telling the search engines which is your preferred version, or stopping them from trying to index your less preferred versions. There are several different approaches to this:

Use the canonical tag

Inside the <head> section of your less preferred pages you can add a line such as:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/blog/car-maintenance-101/"  />
which will act as a strong hint to the search engines that this is the address you would prefer them to index instead of the current page. For more information on the canonical tag see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

robots.txt

Alternatively you can tell the search engines not to index certain pages (or directories) by adding a Disallow rule to the robots.txt file in the root directory of your website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /blog/category

This rule stop all search engines from indexing any pages in the /blog/category directory of the website.

robots meta tag

Sometimes it is not really possible to create a suitable rule in the robots.txt file. An alternative approach is to set the robots meta tag on specific pages that you don’t want to have indexed.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

This would tell the search engines not to bother indexing this page and not to follow any of the links from this page.

Final Thoughts

It is possible to get into duplicate content problems even on pages that appear to be totally different if you make the mistake of using standard title and description meta tags across your whole website

Be careful if you are considering using robots.txt or the robots meta tag on legacy pages that may already have inbound links. You don’t want to eliminate any existing link juice. In this case, it would probably be better to use the canonical tag or do a 301 redirect so that the link juice is attributed to the desired page.

You are probably aware of the fact that Search Engine Optimisation is very effective at generating sales online, especially from new customers. Consider these statistics from a 2009 Forbes survey:

Granted, the survey is based on US data and carries a slant towards organisations with a large online marketing budget. (Email and e-newsletter in the above table is assumed to be in-house).

However, the tactics at the top of the list are the very tactics that First Rate has been successfully executing for the last 9 years on behalf of New Zealand and Australian organisations.

First Rate knows from first-hand experience that SEO, SEM and Email are as fundamental to a large organisation’s marketing strategy as they are to small and mid sized companies.

In fact, First Rate believes that Search is the most important online acquisition tactic because it can deliver outstanding business results. Is Search generating great results for your business right now?

Furthermore, did you realise that SEO is also an extremely valuable tactic for building your brand presence online?

First Rate calls this Performance Branding (growing brand awareness on a pay-for-performance basis). SEO provides millions of free search impression and thousands of clicks – what other channel can deliver these sorts of branding results?

Have you ever come across a TV or Radio network happy to provide you with free ad coverage? (Never mind actual visits to your website.)

TV and Radio advertising certainly has its allure, however, before more budgets are allocated to these channels, you should really re-evaluate your presence on the search engines. Are you currently maximising your budget..?

Here are some practical questions you should ask your marketing team:

1. How much are we paying per sale (or lead) from offline channels?
2. How much are we paying per sale (or lead) from online channels?
3. Do you know how many more sales (or leads) the website could generate?
4. How do we rank on generic keyword terms in the search engines compared to our competitors?
5. Are all our products indexed and ranking well in the search engines?
6. Are we happy with both the number of conversions and the cost per conversion derived from Search Engine Marketing?
7. What types of search ads generate the best results?
8. What types of landing pages generate the best results?
9. Are we continuously evaluating all aspects of our search marketing?
10. Have we explored search as a branding channel?