Online Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Tips for Small & Medium Businesses

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Is Page Load Time Going to be a Ranking Factor on Google?

November 17, 2009 By 1 Comment

Google wants your website to be faster. Matt Cutts recent interview at PubCon clearly indicates this. So if your website is slow, pull-up your sleeves and start working to make it faster. It would not only make your visitors happy, but can also improve your search rankings.

  • Identify garbage codes on your pages and remove it. Html, css, javascript, any junk that has piled up there should go. 
  • Follow web standards. Check w3c validators to remove and correct your codes.
  • Happy talk should die. Check, edit and remove unnecessary content that does not create value.
  • Reduce graphic images and file sizes or other media which is creating overload without creating much design and usability benefits.
  • Be real stingy

Website load speed is a usability issue. By making your site faster you are providing users a pleasure equivalent to driving on the freeways.

Matt Cutts Interview Video on Page Load Speed



Filed Under: Blog, Search Engine Optimization, Web Usability, Website Optimization Tagged With: , , ,

Website Optimization Strategy – Project Report

July 3, 2009 By 7 Comments

Realtor.com

Company Background

Realtor.com is the flagship site of Move, Inc., and the official site of the National Association of Realtors. It is the No. 1 consumer destination for real estate related information with more than 6.3 million monthly unique users and over 3 million listings.

As a leader in online real estate, it is considered the essential resource for consumers seeking information and connections they need before, during and after a housing move. The company has been providing information and decision support tools for consumers looking for home information on the Internet through Realtor.com and Move.com for the last ten years. [Read more...]

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Use Flash and Graphics to Complement the Content Not to Impress Visitors

March 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Unless you have a designing, photography or fashion website, don’t try to impress your visitors with splash pages, heavy graphics or fancy fonts. Use graphics and flash to complement your content and to provide additional functionality, not to grab visitors attention. The designs may look cool to you but visitors definitely won’t be that impressed unless there is something in it for them. They will be bored and will leave your website prematurely without doing what you expected them to do on the site.

Online visitors are always in a hurry and looking for “doing something” or “going somewhere”. You must, therefore, respect their time and provide them the right content at right places instead of wasting efforts on short gimmicks. Web is full of that stuff and visitors have learned to ignore that. I hope, you do not want your visitors to ignore your websites.

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Title Tags

March 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The title element:

  • defines a title in the browser toolbar
  • provides a title for the page when it is added to favourites
  • displays a title for the page in search-engine results

Title tag is important not just as part of your search engine optimization strategy, but also for visitors, giving them a feel of what your page is all about. As title tags are displayed as main headlines on search rankings along with short descriptions of your web pages, visitors almost always read them first to come to your pages.

Title tags should, therefore, be very specific and relevant to the content of each page. Putting several keywords that do not make sense to the content of the pages in order to gain higher rankings, will not only prove costly with search engines penalizing you for this, but will also leave not so good impression on your search visitors.

An important point to remember is to have different title tags on each page as each page contains different content. Putting identical title tags on different pages will make you job difficult when analyzing those pages on the title attribute of your web analytics software.

Filed Under: Blog, Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: , , ,
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