Alex Schultz

Category: natural search

  • Website gzip compression – making your site faster for Google site performance and SEO

    The latest google changes suggest it’s really important for a webmaster that their site is fast to perform in SEO after Q1. As such I’ve been cranking on a few things I outlined in my previous note. Here are my site speed results. Yay it’s getting faster!

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    Firstly removing the yahoo includes gained me about 50% (and didn’t lose me any of my non existent delicious traffic). This gained the site almost a full quartile in terms of site speed.

    Secondly I decided to get to work on the gzip compression they called out since I thought my site already had gzip compression it was a surprise to me that this was an issue.

    Gzip compression is a best practice for speeding up your site according to pretty much everyone out there. It sounds hard but is actually stupidly easy and around 90% of web traffic accepts gzip today (according to yahoo).

    If the header request contains:

    Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

    Then Gzip is supported. In apache you just have to turn on mod_gzip for Apache 1.3 whereas Apache 2.x is mod_deflate

    Anyway it all becomes a lot easier if you have cpanel installed on your hosting since it short cuts having to do the sysadmin changes yourself. Under cpanel find the following section

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    Click on optimize website then select optimize all content.

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    This works perfectly on a small orange and other hosts who give you cpanel.

    To check if gzip is working here is the header my site sent before I turned it on:

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    And here it is after:

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    You can see in the second header from the site it contains the line “Content-Encoding: gzip” which makes clear gzip is on.

    Good luck making your site faster. I’ll keep you up to speed on my results.

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  • Making my site faster with Google’s coming site speed changes

    Given google’s recently announced plan to factor site speed into it’s search algorithm in Q1 I decided to take a look at their new site speed tool in the Google labs section of the webmaster tools interface. The results are below.

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    Bottom line some really quick wins, kill the delicious button on every page of my paper airplane site that is harming my load time. Replace the old google analytics code with the new google analytics asynchronous snippet and get the whole site gzip compressed (am really bummed my shared hosting doesn’t do this already, seems an easy win).

    Nice tool released by Google so you should all take a look at it and at least nail the quick wins. This will be a big deal in Q1 I am sure (although that being said caffeine as a whole is gonna be interesting).

    The other interesting note today is here from search engine land google is now personalizing results for everyone with a google cookie. My search has gotten better and better thanks to this but as someone who worries about SEO I often look at the non-personalized results too. Personalized and non-personalized are diverging rapidly so really understanding user behavior and making your site compelling is growing more and more important.

    Long term optimizing for user experience is key to maximize success in Google (site speed, low bounce rate etc…) and social media. I think it’s great that generating traffic and user satisfaction are coming closer and closer together.

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  • The domain migration may be working

    I recently migrated my paper airplanes site to a new domain and was worried about the SEO impact. The good news is that it looks like the migration is working. Google has started indexing the new domain and my rankings are slowly recovering. The 301 redirects seem to be passing authority properly. It’s still early days but the signs are positive.

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  • Challenges facing enterprise SEO marketing

    Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me.

    I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:

    • Understanding the addressable market & actual current marketshare
    • Duplicate content issues
    • Getting deep links at scale to 100MM’s of pages
    • Self processing huge volumes of traffic data
    • optimizing 100MM’s of landing pages
    • calculating the value of a given potential seo change
    • dealing with international

    So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.

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  • Amazing Speakers I have heard recently

    I wanted to share a little list of folks I have heard talk recently (online or in person) who I think are totally amazing and worth listening to:

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  • Yelp linking to Yahoo!

    I hope I am not slow on the uptake spotting this but are yelp and yahoo working together on local search? At the foot of a las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way) there is a link to Yahoo! local.

    The link is not “no followed” and points to Yahoo local’s las vegas steakhouse page which is currently top ten in Google for a search for “las vegas steak houses” and is actually ahead of Yelp! I can’t see any reason Yelp! would be doing this unless it’s some kind of business relationship.

    Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page all 90 back links come from Yelp. It would be great if Google is ok with this for big companies since that would totally alter my backlinking strategy but I guess that the better user experience would be for Google to contain the links to the main web location for all the las vegas restaurants that yelp or yahoo have on their search results pages. I’m going to keep an eye on this one.

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  • How to be an effective seo within your organization: PubCon 08 – be positive

    This year was my first presentation at pubcon and I was super excited to get the opportunity to participate. The area of my presentation was to evaluate how to be an effective in house SEO and I was lucky enough to be on the panel with Aaron Shear, Tony Adam, Jessica Bowman and Scott Polk.

    The main topic of all our talks was how do you convince your company to support you in doing SEO and the talks split into two fronts… play company politics or push positive results and momentum. I was definitely in the second bucket.

    I essentially had 5 points:

    1. alignment – You must be aligned with your companies #1 goal in SEO. Discard everything but that target: eBay = ROI, facebook = user growth
    2. measurement – sometimes you can get support just by measuring how much value seo is generating. Whatever happens you are in a measurable field, you can quantify your impact and so be that guy, measure your results and hang your hat on them
    3. results – do something simple and get a result to build credibility… for example a really small thing like swapping “<company name> | <page title>” to “<page title> | <company name>” can drive results
    4. double down – you got a result… now get more. Keep it small, keep it coming and show that you are an expert. I think this momentum building is 10x more positive as an approach rather than going out and producing a powerpoint strategy deck
    5. share – now start to share your success, start to teach people how to do it themselves. Build that powerpoint and let the senior folks know what you need to do even more.

    I think this is the secret to be successful in almost any internet marketing role to get success. You can be the person who says “I am positive”,”I can do more with less than you believe” and above all let your work speak for itself and you can do no wrong.

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  • I Got Hacked

    So probably one of the worst things that has happened to me online ever happened 2 weeks ago… my site was hacked. I hadn’t upgraded the version of adlogger I was using on the site and someone inserted some malicious code which then took over my site redirecting any visitor to a pure adsense page.

    Google spotted this and took action which utterly decimated my website traffic but I wholeheartedly applaud Google for doing… 100% the right thing to do and interestingly they spotted the issue at essentially the same time as I did and removed it from the site so great job by them!

    The one thing that does frustrate me about this is that Google funded the hacker. It’s obviously terrible I got hacked and I have revised my processes to hopefully make things better but it’s doubly terrible that hackers are now funding themselves via Google AdSense… Given the experience I have in this marketplace through my affiliate work over the years it is also clear that people don’t do this unless they are getting away with it, so Google can’t be taking the money from them fast enough to dissuade them from doing this… that’s the only way it works.

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  • Brand Keyword Bidding

    Brand keyword bidding is big business and it’s becoming bigger. For anyone in the internet marketing industry it’s crucial to watch this trend and esp the decisions Google is making around it.

    Within the affiliate industry brand bidding initially was a quick way to make a buck. In 2003-2005 affiliate managers were often slow to realize affiliates were making money for essentially no work. Even now many affiliates use a combination of geo-targeting and day parting to work around affiliate managers and get away with brand bidding.

    As that loop hole was closed and brands took their brand name bidding in house worldwide and affiliate networks policed out the majority of the affiliates doing brand bidding Google made two changes which made brand names far less lucrative for them in many countries (esp. the UK). Google stopped allowing multiple ads for one website to appear on the same search result and Google also allowed companies to claim their brand so that no one else could bid on it (in the UK). On April 4th Google changed this second policy and that angered a lot of brand owners in the UK.

    Two things make this policy change an excellent way for Google to make money: 1) Branded search made up 76% of searches in the UK in 2007 according to some studies. 2) Having only one person bidding on their own brand can result in their bid being as low as $0.01 – just adding another person into the auction can push that up tremendously giving a huge boost in Google revenue.

    I can’t really decide what to think about the way Google is acting here. Would it be fair for companies who sell NorthFace clothing not to be able to bid on the word NorthFace? On the other hand is it fair that Google essentially extorts brands to spend in some cases $100k’s a week to simply ensure that someone who was looking for them comes to their site?

    This little post is just a thought starter BUT as an internet marketer it is crucial you have to have a branded search strategy covering both SEO and SEM. Google won’t let you get away without it.

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  • A little bit of an update on the Stumble Testing

    Using Stumbleupon buttons on my paper airplanes site was an interesting idea that I tried a few weeks back. It seems to be working pretty well. Below you see the graph of traffic I am getting from Stumble over time from the last big stumble spike (following which I added the stumble button).

    For November (i.e. not including the spike in october) Stumbleupon now makes up 10% of my site growth and approx. 1% of all site traffic. I have a fair few ideas for how to boost this source of traffic even more and am really keen to give it a go soon!!!

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