Archive for SEO

Black Hat Warning

22 September 2008

A while ago I did some interviews with some bloggers friends or online contacts. One of the questions was “Have you ever used any Black Hat technique?”. The questions was intended for those who wanted to make money with their blogs or web sites. None of them answered positively. The answers were “No”, “None” or “I don’t know what Blach Hat is”.

OK, so the next logical question is “Did you earn enough from your online activity as to declare it a full-time job?”. The question was never asked, because, on some extent, it implies that only by using obscure techniques, one can earn lots of money.

And, in the end, aren’t we all using some [Insert Dark Color Here] Hat techniques when commenting just for backlinks, or writing the minimum number of posts on some forum just to be allowed to add a signature? I think we are.

Do You Need An Archive Page?

25 July 2008

Why have I removed my Archives page? It’s wasted space. A simple statistics or analytics tool would tell you that no one is really interested in picking a random month and read the articles.

As most of the traffic is generated by search engines, the Archives are useful just to show off how long have you been blogging, and how many articles per month have you written.

I went through a thorough clean up a while ago, and I never thought about the Archives.

If your theme allows it, place the Archives at the bottom, or in one of the footer columns. Don’t let it waste your space in the sidebar. No one cares. You could add on your tagline “Blogging since 2004″, but if your blog is less than a year old, than wipe out those Archives.

8 Ways To Speed Up Your Web Site

12 July 2008

1. Put stylesheets at the top

This is a common practice, however there are some web sites which embed stylesheets, especially using the @import command somewhere else in the page. This is not good, as the page renders progressively, that is we want the browser to display whatever content it has as soon as possible. This is especially important for pages with a lot of content and for users on slower Internet connections.

The problem with putting stylesheets near the bottom of the document is that it prohibits progressive rendering in many browsers, including Internet Explorer. These browsers block rendering to avoid having to redraw elements of the page if their styles change. The user is stuck viewing a blank white page.

2. Put scripts at the bottom

The problem caused by scripts is that they block parallel downloads. The HTTP/1.1 specification suggests that browsers download no more than two components in parallel per hostname.

In some situations it’s not easy to move scripts to the bottom. If, for example, the script uses document.write to insert part of the page’s content, it can’t be moved lower in the page. There might also be scoping issues. In many cases, there are ways to workaround these situations. That will make your web pages load faster.

3. Make JavaScript and CSS external

Yes, we all know this but we don’t respect it all the time. Using external files in the real world generally produces faster pages because the JavaScript and CSS files are cached by the browser. JavaScript and CSS that are inlined in HTML documents get downloaded every time the HTML document is requested. This reduces the number of HTTP requests that are needed, but increases the size of the HTML document. On the other hand, if the JavaScript and CSS are in external files cached by the browser, the size of the HTML document is reduced without increasing the number of HTTP requests.

4. Flush the PHP buffer

This was new to me, too, and I will start using it in my themes, if tests and benchmarks prove to speed things up. I found it while trying to validate, optimize and speed up my blog.

When users request a page, it can take anywhere from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to stitch together the HTML page. During this time, the browser is idle as it waits for the data to arrive. In PHP you have the function flush(). It allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that the browser can start fetching components while your backend is busy with the rest of the HTML page. The benefit is mainly seen on busy backends or light frontends.

A good place to consider flushing is right after the HEAD because the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce and it allows you to include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend is still processing.

Example:

... <!-- css, js -->
</head>
<?php flush(); ?>
<body>
... <!-- content -->

5. Preload components

Preload may look like the opposite of post-load, but it actually has a different goal. By preloading components you can take advantage of the time the browser is idle and request components (like images, styles and scripts) you’ll need in the future. This way when the user visits the next page, you could have most of the components already in the cache and your page will load much faster for the user.

However, you should first ask yourself if the visitor really wants to go to the next page.

6. Use subdomains for static components

When the browser makes a request for a static image and sends cookies together with the request, the server doesn’t have any use for those cookies. So they only create network traffic for no good reason. You should make sure static components are requested with cookie-free requests. Create a subdomain and host all your static components there. Images, JavaScript and CSS. Use this measure only if you have a huge web site with lots of requests and database access.

7. Choose <link> over @import

One of the previous best practices states that CSS should be at the top in order to allow for progressive rendering.

In IE @import behaves the same as using <link> at the bottom of the page, so it’s best not to use it.

8. Don’t scale images in HTML

Don’t use a bigger image than you need just because you can set the width and height in HTML. If you need

<img width="100" height="100" src="/category/seo/page/2/image.png" alt="" />

then your image (/category/seo/page/2/image.png) should be 100×100px rather than a scaled down 500×500px image.

SEO Or Redesign?

26 June 2008

SEO or redesign? This questions troubled me for a while now. As the majority of my blogs are fully SEOed, either by SEO plugins, backlinks, valid sitemaps and more, I needed a change, a refresh. So I decided to change some things.

The official Butterfly Media Romania web site features WordPress and has the same theme as the blog. Identity, right? Theme consistency. I wouldn’t want to fool my readers. I will keep updating my scripts and my WordPress themes on the main site, just like on the blog.

The Butterfly Media Romania theme (both the web site and the blog) will get a major overhaul in the following days, for more stability, validity, faster loading times and less cluttering.

I will also dig a little deeper into affiliate marketing, but that’s another story in another evening.

Do You Have OCD?

10 June 2008

I’ve seen recently a show on Zone Reality about the OCD (Obsessive-compulsive disorder). One of its many manifestations that caught my attention was the “stuffing”. There are some people who use to gather things and keep them inside their homes, with no apparent use. No, I rephrase, they’re actually useless.

Extending this manifestation, I could ask (myself) 2 questions.

  1. Am I “stuffing” things on my blog?
  2. Am I “stuffing” things on my notebook?

I definitely am “stuffing” things on my blog. The Blog Clean Up Day helped me a lot, as I removed some useless banners, links, plugins and 1 88×31 button :) . Nevertheless, stuff remained on my blog, but it will go away on a monthly basis, as I do research to see what AdSense banners work best (or work at all), what links are clicked, what scripts are slowing down my blog, and what plugins I don’t really use.

About the second question, I remember reading a while ago, when I started this blog, about how to clean up your notebook. I am “stuffing” things. I gather text, images, software, all kinds of useless stuff. This question will remain to get answered, as I still have things I don’t want to throw away. The best solution I could came up with, was share all the movies, pictures, ebooks with services such as YouTube, Scribd, Imageshack and other media sharing services.

They could get really handy as some specialized blog resources.

Photo source

Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes