As this is such a important aspect of the Google Ranking Algorithm Google has been working on Page Speed Online which was released in 31^st March 2011.

So what is Page Speed Online?

Page Speed Online, analyzes the performance of web pages and gives specific suggestions for making them faster.

Page Speed Online is available from any browser, at any time.

This allows website owners to get immediate access to Page Speed performance suggestions so they can make their pages faster.

Instantaneously after the release of the Page Speed Online Web Developers requested to make an API available to integrate into other tools and their regression testing suites.

A couple of weeks on and The Google Page Speed Team have quickly come back to us with the release of the Page Speed Online API.

With this API, developers now have the ability to integrate performance analysis very simply in their command-line tools and web performance dashboards.

Google has also provided a getting started guide that helps you to get up and running quickly, understand the API, and start monitoring the performance improvements that you make to your web pages.

Further more you will be able to specify whether you’d like to see mobile or desktop analysis, and also get Page Speed suggestions in one of the 40 languages.

Page Speed API for WordPress

For the many WordPress fans out there you will also be very pleased to know that you can include the Page Speed API into your WordPress dashboard using the W3 Total Cache which will provide suggestions readily available when users login.

“The Page Speed tool itself provides extremely pointed and valuable insight into performance pitfalls. Providing that tool via an API has allowed me to directly correlate that feedback with actionable solutions that W3 Total Cache provides.” said Frederick Townes, CTO Mashable and W3 Total Cache author.

Related posts:

1. 6 Easy Steps to Speed Up Your Internet
2. Google Page Rank Sucks!
3. What’s happening with Google?

This is his answer:

“Let’s assume that you are really control everything within the website, and you are really smart SEO and you have internal supporters”

One thing to pay attention is Optimisation for speed.
It is a (slight) factor in Google’s ranking, but lots of different people have run tests and they’ve discovered that When pages are returned quicker at your website, customers end up doing more things – more purchases, more exploring, more browsing, more sign ups.
You can definetely increase ROI if you decrease your website speed or latency.
So I would try to make sure that you can make your site a little bit faster.
That’s the one thing I would pay attention to.
It can be as simple as minifying JavaScript or CSS, trying to make sure images are corrctly opmitsed and used.
All relatively simple things, but they can have big impact on a website bottom line when you think about user behaviour.
…
Also, things as simple as making sure that your internal linking structure is consistent, that you’re not dropping links off the edge os a cliff with 404 errors.
Trying to make sure that when you do make internal links, they’re good keywords but not spammy, but describe the product in a very specific descriptive way.
So, optimise for speed, try to make sure you’ve got good internal CMS practices and internal linking.
And then the last thing, if you’ve got all that in a row is I would think about Social Media Marketing.
Social Media Marketing, spreading content on Twitter, spreading content on Facebook, on Digg, Reddit, Stumble Upon…
Those can be ways to get what you want to talk about out to a wider audience.

Now how can Social Media affect SEO?

Well, if you get 100 visitors, on eof those visitors might make a blog post or might make a link, and that link could eventually flow Page Rank and send more visitors.
So a lot of people think SEO versus Social Media Marketing, and a lot of the times it makes sense to keep a holistic view and say OK, first you have to have attractive content, some reason why your website is not just a brochure – why people would want to link to your website.
To sum up, I would optimise for Speed, I would make sure your internal linkings and CM is in good shape.

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1. Measuring your website Goals. I think you’ve got one don’t you?
2. Improve customer retention and conversions on your site.
3. Google Business Maps – A quick guide for beginners

Webmaster tools is far the most underutilised tool on your web marketing arsenal.

Webmaster tools is not just essential for your SEO strategy but it can also be very very handy for your Web analysis and pre-strategy plan.  A smart strategist can use this data to improve how search engines crawl and index your site’s content but it also can understand and explore opportunities looking through SEO eyes.

Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google released an excellent video about usage of Webmaster tools, enjoy.

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1. Google Business Maps – A quick guide for beginners
2. Who Else Wants a Higher ROI?
3. Dmoz, Yahoo Directory and BOTW – Are Directories important for SEO?

Why reinvent the wheel when you can get your competitors blueprints and improve your website accordingly?

It is relatively easy to research the successful concepts, techniques & methods your competitors have tried and tested. Review your competitors work based on the following topics:

• On Page Optimisation
• Link Building
• Social Media

So what are the methods of attaining actionable info from your competitors?

1. Select the right Competitors to analyse

Firstly, knowing who your main competitors or industry leaders are is an important first step for any business. But which competitor should you analyse?

Identify the competitor that your feel best resembles your own business. Make sure they have a good online presence. You can check this by searching in Google your most competitive keywords and identify their performance. If you are seeing consistent results you are then on the right track and can be assured that you have chosen a good competitor to analyse. There are also free tools available that can compare websites.

2. Insight into Competitors Website Structure

Now that you have a good understanding of who your real competitors are the next step is to commence the analysis. Understanding your competitors website, structure, content and size is the starting point of your analysis. This is because it can unearth the complexity of the strategy being adopted, there are several tools capable of crawling your competitors websites.

3. On Page Optimisation:

The next step is to look at the on page optimisation of the site. Does your competitors website have any common themes or topics consistent throughout the site? Is there a clear indicator that the website is consistent, relevant and topical, which attracts search engines.

Review the list of pages specifically focusing on the page titles, descriptions and URL structure to identify any consistencies throughout the website. For example, can you identify the keyword being targeted on the page? This can be determined by identifying consistent keywords reflected in the URL, Page title and description that are being used to set the relevancy of the page. This is a very important part of the competitors analyse and should be completed thoroughly to identify any patterns.

Take this even further to understand the level of on page optimisation undertaken by the competitor you can look at whether image optimisation has been taken into consideration. This can be identified by the use of alt tags and title tags. Additionally, internal links should be reviewed to see if the use of no-follow is incorporated, this can help funnel Page Rank to the most valuable pages within your website.

4. Competitor Keyword Intelligence

Often site owners target a vast range of keywords in the hope of increasing their exposure and opportunities to generate traffic. This sounds great in theory, but the reality is only a small percentage of keywords actually provide quality traffic. The key here is to unearth the successful keywords and focus solely on them.

Trying to identify the competitors’ keywords that are performing can be difficult and time-consuming process. However there are plenty of software available that can analyse the website and provide the top performing keywords, try these sites complete.com and Spyfu.com. Once the list of potential keywords has been identified it is important to validate the list of keywords using similar software.

5. Competitor Backlink Analysis

It is staggering the amount of website owners, SEOers, and online marketers that again try and reinvent the wheel when it comes to generating or sourcing new inbound links.

Backlinking competitors using the range of tools available or even through search engines (using the appropriate operators) allows you to generate an inclusive list of URL’s linking to your competitor. Inbound links to your website play a very important role in the search engine’s algorithm. Quality links from credible sites will typically have a great impact than that from poor quality irrelevant website. So the key here is to determine from your list of backlinks which are good quality sources worth perusing for your website & which can be disregarded. Use Page Rank to initially gauge the quality of the website.

Background Information

Understand what other online assets your competitor may have. This is important as it could unearth any new initiatives your competitor is using or planning on using.

To do this you can use the list of domains your competitor is linking to and use Whois to check the information of each of the websites. Additionally, use DomainTools.com, which allows you to complete a review IP lookup this will indicate other websites that your competitor has hosted on the Server IP address. This will identify any of the website that are actually owned or run by the competitor. It also indicates if your competitor has a network of sites linking back to their site.

Now that you have completed the initial competitive analyse it the most important stage is to put your findings into practice. Firstly, you need to determine which strategies are going to be worth using on your website. Obviously not all strategies are going to be suited and some may need refinement to suit your requirements. The final step is to monitor your efforts and refine where needed to ensure you are on the right track.

That’s not the end of competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis is an on-going process for all areas of your SEO campaign, it should be actioned on a regular basis to ensure that your website and business is striving for continued success.

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We all know position is king when it comes to PPC campaigns, with most traffic coming from the first two positions, but purely focusing on this point can waste a client’s investment. Aligning the client’s business objectives is an important step in understanding Bid Management techniques.

However before exploring Bid Management techniques it is important to better understand the algorithm behind the most popular PPC software, Google’s Adwords. Unlike with other companies PPC models, Google’s Adwords is not purely based on bidding for the highest keywords to get position 1. They also take into consideration the Click Through Rate (CTR), which is the number of people who actually click on the ad. It is then averaged using the Cost Per Impression (CPM) method, which is based on the average cost of showing the ad per thousand displays (cost per thousand impressions).

Now that we have a better understanding of Google’s algorithm we can look at using bid management techniques to get better returns on investment. Having clear objectives for the campaign is an important first step; just trying to impress the client by being number 1 is not a good use of client’s money. What does the client ultimately want, is it purely awareness, which is impressions or do they want people clicking and converting to sales?

Impressions and the click through rates are influenced by position; the higher the ad & more targeted the ad the more clicks or views it will receive (ad copy will also influence click through rates).
What’s not taken into consideration is the quality of clicks. Ads shown in position 1 will attract a high percentage of clicks, but the quality of clicks can be low. To improve conversion rates and maximise the budget, marketers should aim to be still on the first page of Google, but not necessarily position 1. Position 3 to 5 can still generate good volumes of clicks to your website and they tend to be more qualified (better quality clicks). The CPM rate for position 1 and 2 are high so by reducing the bid of the keyword can help improve the conversion rate. It is important to note, ad copy impacts the number of clicks, poorly written copy will attract less clicks.

Search Marketers need to workout the optimal conversion rate that will deliver the desired clicks and impression for your ads. With Google releasing very little information about their algorithm it is up to your Search Marketing company to continually research, test and refine ads to maximise return on investment.

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3. Online Brand Management for dummies – 1

He did, in February, this excellent short on Chatroulette that became the official explanation of what is the site.

Casey has now published his new video in the same style as the previous video sums up the controversy about Facebook’s privacy.

The very title says: a movie for anyone who is the “blue social network” – Facebook.

A Movie for Anyone On FaceBook from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

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Everytime I’m speaking on an Internet Marketing Seminar or teaching Social Media Classes I always listen to the same question:

“I’ve got limited time to invest in social media, but there seem to be a million sites out there. How do I know which one is worth my time? If I only have time for one, which one should it be?”

Generally I try to explain that all tools available should fit into your strategy and your level of commitment – either time or content production- and I then explain how I use my various online presence and my expectation with each one of them.

However every single time I end up talking about LinkedIn and my fixation with this tool.

What is Linkedin?

LinkedIn is a website that allows professional network with over 70 million members globally.

LinkedIn is one of those sites that tends to get brushed aside in the sexy, shiny world of social media. It’s not flashy, we rarely hear buzz about billion dollar valuations and you don’t get a billion email reminders to visit because your contacts on LinkedIn are not encouraged to write on your wall, send zombies after you or take lengthy and inane quizzes.

What are LinkedIn Features?

Linkedin has many handy features but one I like to use most are their groups. A powerful networking strategie along with seeding content strategy.

LinkedIn Groups allow you to:

* Quickly discover the most popular discussions in your professional groups.
* Have an active part in determining the top discussions by liking and commenting.
* Follow the most influential people in your groups by checking the Top Influencers board or clicking their profile image to see all their group activity.
* See both member-generated discussions and news in one setting.
* Easily browse previews of the last three comments in a discussion.
* Find interesting discussions by seeing who liked a discussion and how many people commented.

LinkedIn has now rolled out few changes to their groups making it more social and more engaging.

Watch the video below.

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