Somewhere within Google, there’s an organization known as the “Make the Web Faster” initiative. It’s based on the belief that the faster pages load in your browser, the better. People are no longer content to sit drumming their fingers while waiting for a web page to display. Slow web pages are a user turn-off, and we’ve written before about how that can affect your rankings, at least in Google. In fact, Google’s position on this is clear from this statement:

“At Google, we’re obsessed with speed – we measure it, pick it apart, think about it constantly.  It’s even baked into our quarterly goals.”

We include page download speed issues in optimization recommendations for our clients, and wrote about a tool Google created called “Page Speed” to help webmasters identify specific speed issues and which suggests how to fix them.

Recently, Google announced a great new tool – sort of the next generation page speedup technology:

We just launched a new open-source Apache module called mod_pagespeed that any webmasters can use to quickly and automatically optimize their sites. (It’s like Page Speed, but makes the changes automatically.)

Google says this new tool can double the speed of web page downloads, and do it automatically. It’s not something the typical business owner should mess with, as it’s a bit technical. But you ought to make your webmaster aware of the tool if you have any slow pages on your site. Google describes it this way:

mod_pagespeed includes several filters that optimize JavaScript, HTML and CSS stylesheets. It also includes filters for optimizing JPEG and PNG images. The filters are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who set up mod_pagespeed in addition to configuring proper caching and compression on their Apache distribution should expect to see an improvement in the loading time of the pages on their websites.

The improved user experience will contribute to your conversion rate, and the prospect of ranking higher in Google as a by-product is nothing to sneeze at. Here’s Google’s page for mod_pagespeed.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors on your web site who convert into paying customers, clients, or patients. In a recent article in Website Magazine, Tim Ash encourages website owners to “Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash”. Tim, CEO of SiteTuners.com a landing page optimization firm, says that you may have been led astray by your web designer. He says that because of the limitations of their unique perspective, web designers are predisposed to (inadvertently) sacrifice your conversions in the name of “coolness”.

Not all web designers fall into the “coolness” trap, as is evidenced by our strategic partners. But many do. Perhaps the most egregious form of this is web designers who design entire websites in all Flash, rendering them irretrievably invisible to search engines. But there are many other lesser evils that can be perpetrated on your poor web pages that make them less likely to drive your visitors to take the action you want them to take. Here’s a bit of what Tim says:

Unfortunately, many … pages are … a visual assault on the senses, forcing the visitor to determine what (if any) of the many striking visual elements on the page are important.

Before

Graphic designers are rarely trained in maximizing conversion. The best ones pride themselves on their ability to be non-conformists, and their ability to “think outside the box.” They are bored with standard production-oriented graphic design work and like to keep themselves entertained by doing something new and interesting on every project. Unfortunately, the goal of the design is often lost, resulting in these chaotic … pages.

Wild background colors — Many … pages use dark and dramatic color themes. Often, large sections of the page or entire backgrounds are black or fully-saturated bright colors. The color choices often create a dark and brooding atmosphere, or imply something so exotic that would only appeal to teenage male adrenaline junkies who play too many video games.

Garish text — Page text and headlines are haphazardly placed on the page and often use very large font in high contrast colors. Font sizes are often enormous, and are further emphasized by the use of edging effects, drop shadows, color transitions and needs, and fill patterns.

Visual embellishments and flourishes — Even simple page elements such as box edges are emphasized with drop shadows, glow, or other effects. Simple round discs in bullet list are replaced by colorful graphical check marks or other icons. A neutral background space to the site of the landing page is often filled in with intricate patterns or photographic images.

After

Animation or video — All other design mistakes on the landing page pale in comparison to the aggressive use of motion, animation, and video. Images and text pulsate or revolve, image slideshows use wild fly-in transition effects, intricate animation sequences draw the eye, and full-motion video auto-plays on the page. These attention-grabbing tactics are very powerful. Unfortunately, they are rarely tied to the desired conversion goal on the … page and only serve to squander a few precious seconds of limited visitor attention. Never deploy rich media on your page without first testing to determine its impact on conversion.

Tim then presented a case study illustrating the before and after versions of an important page for a national client of theirs, along with eye-tracking results. He convincingly presents the case that you need to create web pages that draw the eye and the attention of your visitor to the places on the page that will drive them to call you or buy from you.

Last November, we predicted that Google would soon factor page download speed into its ranking algorithm. Well, last month, Google announced that they had, in fact, started to use site speed as one of the 200+ signals that influence the position of a website in their search results:

“As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...] We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will stick around to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient and will often click away from a slow loading site before it finishes loading. It’s in recognition of that behavior that Google is factoring page speed into it’s ranking.

With all that said, it’s important to point out that page speed is not Google’s most important ranking signal. The end of Google’s page speed announcement contains a very important sentence: “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.”

Here are a few tips to improve your own page speed:

• Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A “cheap” web host may cause problems.
• Use as few images as possible on your website.
• Compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web. You don’t need to make users download a 10 megapixel photo to display it on their monitor only 500 pixels wide.
• Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
• Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
• Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
• If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
• Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.
• Check out Google’s Site Speed site, which provides you with even more resources to help speed up your pages.

Have you ever clicked on a link and encountered a “404 Error – Page Not Found” error? Frustrating, huh? Once you’re there, it’s not obvious how to get back to what you were looking for on the web site. This is often caused by a web page that’s been moved or renamed. It can also happen when someone else links to your site improperly, causing your site to be unable to find the page they intended to link to. This is a sure-fire way to get visitors to leave your site with a bad taste in their mouths.

You need to avoid that in order to retain those visitors, and there’s a simple way to do that. You need to create a special 404 error page that expresses sympathy for your visitor’s plight and helpfully offers to help them find their way. The page should look like a normal page on your site, with normal navigation opportunities and perhaps a suggestion to try your Site Map. For an example of such a page, visit this (nonexistent) page at our web site: http://www.rankmagic.com/non-existent-page.htm.

Once you’ve done that, you need to tell browsers to open that new page when they encounter a 404 error. Simply have your webmaster add the following code to your .htacess file:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

where notfound.html is the filename of your custom 404 error page.

Over the past several months, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. It may soon be the case that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google.

In a recent interview, Google’s Matt Cutts said this:

“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.”

High speed web pages may rank better in Google.

Based on Matt’s comments, it’s probably fair to assume that Google will begin taking page speed into consideration as a ranking factor, although he doesn’t come right out and say that definitively. However making your site faster is going to benefit your users and possibly your sales anyway, so optimizing it for speed is probably a good idea anyway. Then if Google really does start using this as a ranking factor, you’ll be pre-positioned to retain or improve your rankings.
Google is usually pretty good at providing webmasters with tools they can use to help optimize their sites. Google recently announced a Site Speed site, which provides webmasters with even more resources to help speed up their pages.

Speeding up a web site isn’t something most of us are equipped to do, so your webmaster is the one to talk with about this. It’s a good idea to check out your site speed, though, so you know if it needs work.

On an eCommerce site, one of your primary goals needs to be making it easy for people to buy what you’re selling. Assuming you sell more than a handful of products, you need to incorporate a Site Search function. If people have to spend too much time looking for a product, they’re likely to give up and look on someone else’s site.

We have a very simple and free search function on our site in the right-hand column, but a search function specially designed for eCommerce is better for you if your web site sells directly online. Even for a non-eCommerce site like ours that’s mainly informational, a search function proves to be very valuable.

A search function on your web site not only helps your customers find what they’re looking for, but it can also inspire them to look for other products to buy. A customer might think, “Gee, if they have this product, I wonder if they have …” and search for that new product.

Without a search function, you may be missing out on the potential for more sales, just because it’s not convenient for your customers to look for additional products.

User experience, often abbreviated as UX or UE) describes what happens to people as they visit and interact with your web site. One essential component of a good user experience is getting the right people to your web site. If you’re optimizing for the wrong keyword phrases, you may bring lots of visitors to your site who aren’t in your target market. If they’re not interested in your product or service, then they have a poor user experience with your site and they don’t become customers.

Another component is your web site’s navigation. Do users have an easy time finding the product or service they need? Does your site answer their questions? Does it make the buying action (or calling for an appointment, or whatever your desired action is) easy? Is everything on your site obvious to a new visitor? If the answers to any of those questions is “no”, then you’re turning away customers.

Shari Thurow explains why you may need to watch actual users interact with your web site to make sure it’s not driving away customers.

The Toughest SEO Challenge: A 100% Flash site, with all content and navigation contained within a single Flash movie embedded in a single HTML page. (If your website was built with multiple HTML pages with some embedded Flash components, your situation is significantly less difficult.)

Why is this such  problem? A pure Flash site is a major disadvantage for SEO. For one, search engines will see the entire website as a single page. That means that you don’t have the opportunity to optimize different pages for different target keywords. And you also will not gain the inherent SEO advantage that having multiple pages brings to a website: every unique web page has, by default, some degree of search engine status. The single most powerful place for your keywords to appear is in the page title tag. With a single-page web site, you have only a page single title tag to work with — and only 60-80 characters. It’s not easy to fit more than about three keywords into that.

Secondly, outside websites cannot link to interior pages within your site – they are forced to link to your home  page. Some marketers think this is great: your visitors will always be led to your home page and everyone will be subjected to the same “experience” on your site. But you won’t be able to take advantage of “deep links” that can  bring more visitors to your site and improve your search engine rankings. Deep linking is when other websites link to pages within your site other than your home page. For websites with an online shopping component, deep linking is much better than home page linking because users don’t have to navigate (and risk getting lost!) on their way to making a purchase.

Third, and a really significant problem, is that search engines have no clue what your flash “movie” is about. There’s no real text for them to use to identify keywords for indexing your site. All the know is that there’s a movie there.

A Web site called Your SEO Plan provides SEO strategies to deal with these issues, most of which involve significant webmaster effort. It’s far better (and easier) (and cheaper!) to avoid the whole problem from the start.

Congratulations! Through diligent keyword placement, content creation, and internal and external link development, you and/or your SEO consultant have optimized your site to attract search engine visitors for your top related keyword phrases.

Now that they’re coming, how do you get them to stay? And more importantly, how do you get them to buy?

It’s a lot easier than it looks. Jon Rognerud provides 11 techniques, that should assure higher conversion rates, more sales and, best of all, more money in your pocket. Here are the 11 techniques in bullet form – read the article for details:

Clean house before you have visitors over.

Provide details, details, details.

Make suggestions

Create a sense of urgency.

Give clear directions.

Start high, end low.

Everyone likes something for free.

Give your word–and stick to it.

Offer testimonials.

Get them to leave something, if not their money.

Don’t forget to keep working on SEO.

Back when most of us used slow phone modems to surf the web, the speed with which a page loaded was very important. Now that so many people have broadband, is it still important? You bet it is!