Search Engine Optimization: Speed Counts
Let me say right up front that I know very little about Search Engine Optimization.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
From my limited understanding, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in geek-speak, means optimizing your website so that it gets into the search engines and gets found by users. Website owners want to increase the volume of traffic to their sites. The goal of SEO is to get a high rank when web surfers search for your keywords. There are experts that claim they can get you the #1 rank for any search term.
Of course, since the dominant search engine is Google, they are the search engine that everyone is trying to optimize for. And naturally everyone can’t be the #1 rank for some keyword. The are lots of people trying to get to be numero uno. It seems that the main thing Google recommends is to present good, original content on your website that visitors will want to read, see or watch.
So everyone, it seems, is trying to find some trick to become #1 in the Google search engine. Meanwhile, Google’s goal is to make the best user experience possible for web surfers. There is a blog by Google software engineer Matt Cutt that discusses Google and SEO. Anyone that is looking to optimize their website for Google should have a look at Matt’s blog. He also has youtube videos that address this topic.
Speed Counts
What I learned recently by watching his video called State of Index 2009 is that in 2010, speed will count. In other words, how long it takes to load your website will be one consideration in Google ranking. The idea is that a website that take 10 seconds to load is a better and less frustrating experience for the visitor than a page that takes 40 seconds to load.
Revamped Website
So with the goal of providing a better experience for out visitors, we are revamping the LBB website to speed up page loading.
The first thing we did effected the content block on the center of the front page. Now we present only the latest article from Fashion & Swimwear on the front page. Before we had the latest ten articles. (At one time we had the latest twenty articles on the front page.) That is ten large jpeg images and possibly an equal number of youtube videos. To see older pictures and articles, click on the department in the pulldown category menu.
The second thing we did to speed up the loading, is reduce the amount of junk in the sidebars. OK, its not all junk, but there were about 50 or 60 thumbnails. We reduced that to 20 thumbnails. Plus lots of other widgets like ads, search boxes, archives, contents, etc. It doesn’t make sense to get rid of it all, but we cut back a little on the advertising and removed redundant stuff.
The third thing we did was only show excerpts from articles in the category pages. This ends up looking like a table of contents. To read an article, you have to click through.
Let’s see how this works out. Nothing is cast in cement. Everything is a work-in-progress. Thanks for reading.