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!
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
Click on optimize website then select optimize all content.
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:
And here it is after:
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.
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 are very different. 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 and I hope to write a few posts on this over the next year or so (yes I don’t blog a lot so we’ll see what happens)
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:
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.
June 24, 2009 in general comments, internet marketing, natural search | Permalink | Comments (53) | TrackBack (0)