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Adam Audette Interview: Comment Here

1/30/2010 by Leave a Comment

I have been taking the opportunity to speak with various industry people who have deep experience in enterprise SEO. The next in that series is Adam Audette of AudetteMedia. Adam is well known for his work with Internet megabrand Zappos, but has also worked with other large well known brands such as Michelin and the University of Phoenix.

One of the key points that emerges from the interview is that large enterprise organizations are vastly different in their approaches (and acceptance) of SEO. As a result, the challenges in each organization can be quite different. Check out the interview to learn more.

Filed Under: SEO

Recent Video Interviews

1/26/2010 by Leave a Comment

At SES Chicago in December of last year, I did a couple of video interviews. One of these was with Abby Prince of WebProNews on the subject of syndication and duplicate content, and the other was with Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today on the topic of link building. Check them out!

Filed Under: SEO

And the cluelessness goes on

1/22/2010 by 2 Comments

It amazes me when people obviously use scrapers to harvest email addresses and then blindly send out mass emails looking for business. Below is an email I received this morning, with my comments in ():

“Hope you are doing well. (I am glad that she is concerned for my well being)

Haven’t heard back from you, just wondering if you are interested in our services (if she had looked at any page at all on our web site she might be able to guess why we are NOT interested in your services). SEO is one of the most economical and targeted way of marketing (really? I didn’t know that).

As the markets are down and businesses are shy of making fresh investments, it is a good time to increase the efforts and get on top. Most people are holding their investments and it’s comparatively easier to get ranked on the search engines (hurray! my job just got easier!).

Get ranked before your competitor does.

Let me know if you are interested and we can discuss this further. We have some special offer on this New Year.

Kind Regards,” (kindly stop contacting me!)

In our business we spend a lot of time talking about the social web, and the need for businesses to better target their customers. Guess she has missed those discussions.

Filed Under: SEO, Social Web

Will Google make page speed a ranking factor?

1/10/2010 by 20 Comments

Google is obsessed with speed. A tremendous amount of corporate energy is being put into initiatives to speed up the web. Google’s Let’s make the web faster web page asks the question “What would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine?”. This clues us in to their goal – instant response.

To see Google engineers talk about this, check out the 3 1/2 minute video on this page. You can also check out the video on this page which includes the statement that 100 milliseconds is a recognized threshold for users to notice some sluggishness. You can also see more on Google’s thoughts on performance in this Jake Brutlag post titled: Speed Matters. The testing discussed in this post showed that small increases in load time of search results pages, less than 1/2 second, resulted in a decline in searches performed of 0.2% to 0.6%.

Google seems fully prepared to take on the task of rebuilding the Internet if need be, and they are challenging some of the most basic protocols on which the web was built. They have an initiative in place to re-design the HTTP: protocol. Their proposed protocol, known as SPDY: is designed for today’s web environment, which HTTP was not. Testing they have done on SPDY shows a 50% uplift in performance – not bad.

Google has also launched its own Public DNS. The DNS infrastructure plays a critical role in the web, that of converting human friendly web addresses, such as www.stonetemple.com, to machine friendly IP addresses, such as 206.130.117.215. Today’s web pages often involve multiple DNS lookups to load. Speeding up these transactions can only improve overall performance.

The we have Chrome. CNet published a study comparing the Javascript performance of Chrome against two versions of IE, Firefox and Safari. Chrome offered 5x to 10x the performance in running the Javascript tests. Similar data was shown in tests performed by codemeit.

Google is providing some interesting tools for publishers as well. In December 2009 they announced Speed Tracer, a tool for monitoring page load time performance. One key component of the tool is that it allows you to graphically locate trouble spots and then drill down to see what the source of the problem is. In addition, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to get a close up look at your site’s performance:

WMT Speed Measurement Tool

The tool will also let you drill down and get specific suggestions from Google on how to improve site performance:

WMT Speed Up Suggestions

Last, but not least, at Pubcon 2009 in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts stated quite clearly that Site Speed would become a ranking factor. Of course, that does not necessarily mean it actually will be done, but when you look at the overall commitment that Google has to web performance, you can count on it. So when should you begin working on your site performance? I’d say now. Turn site speed into advantage for your business!

Filed Under: Google, SEO