SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

Subject: 13 rules to optimize your Web site performance Author: Manuel Lemos Age in days: 22 Summary: Everybody wants to squeeze as much performance of their Web applications as possible. Usually this requires skilled professionals to achieve. Fortunately, several performance evaluation tools are now available to make Web site performance tuning a much easier task. This post discusses tools like YSlow and other techniques to tune your Web servers performance, as well the results of using such tools and techniques in a busy site like PHPClasses.

Picture, if you will, a Rocky-style montage. A team is involved in website creation from the ground up. A driving, inspirational song begins. The first scene is a highly contentious meeting, with a sweating and nervous marketing executive frantically drawing away at a whiteboard in front of a hostile audience. Flash to copywriters, fingers cracked and bleeding, churning away at their keyboards. Jump to web designers, sporting blurred eyes rimmed with dark circles, peering into their monitors in obvious discomfort. Finally, we see signs of it all coming together. A beautiful home page briefly appears. The music ends. A bell rings. And... Nothing happens...

A quick informal FadBlog post.

We’ve had a fairly quiet summer this year at fadtastic, content-wise. It was partly deliberate due to the small matter of me getting married. Rest assured though, we’ve got some exciting content coming your way this Autumn (or Spring or whatever for those not in the northern hemisphere.) Stay tuned and I hope you understand the lack of updates.

A big thank you to Matt Davies for babysitting fadtastic whilst I was tying the knot.

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Hey everyone! I’m back from vacation and the conference and raring to go. Today’s article is an updated version of one I wrote back in 2004 on the art of SEO.  I recently reviewed it and was surprised at how accurate it still is today.  I figured there are many of you on the list who never read it the first time around, and for those who did, you’ve probably forgotten it by now.

Enjoy! - Jill

As much as Google *pretends* to like SEOs by inviting us to parties at the
Googleplex and posting on SEO forums, the bottom line is that they don’t
like us — or rather, they don’t like what we do. Google wants to find the
best, most relevant sites for the search query at hand all by themselves.
Perhaps someday they will actually be able to do that, but for now, they
still need our help, whether they like it or not.

Unfortunately, unscrupulous SEOs have given Google good reasons not to like us. Because of search engine spammers, Google is constantly changing their ranking criteria and is always on the lookout for the telltale signs of SEO on any given site. It’s not a huge stretch to say that they may even
downgrade the sites that they believe have been SEO’d.

If you think that having your keyword phrases “in all the right places for
SEO” is a good thing, think again! You’re essentially telling Google, “Hey
look…my site has been SEO’d!” To which they reply, “Thanks so much for
letting us know… ZAP … see ya later!” Doesn’t matter if your site is
the most relevant (in your mind) to the search query. Doesn’t matter that
you’ve placed your keyword phrases strategically throughout the site.
That’s actually the thing that may become your downfall.

Stuff that worked like a charm for many people in the early years of SEO may actually hurt rather than help now. As to what might trigger an SEO “red flag,” my guess is that it’s a combination of things. Like, if you have a
certain number of traditional SEO factors on any given page, those may set
off some Google warning bells (otherwise known as a spam filter).

Some of the traditional SEO formulaic elements that you may have been taught to use include putting the keyword phrase:

• in the domain name
• in the file name
• in the Title tag
• in the Meta description tag
• in the Meta keyword tag o in the image alt attributes
• in an H1 (or any H) tag
• as the first words on the page
• in bold and/or italics or a different color
• multiple times in the first paragraph or twice on the page
• in the copy in every single spot on the page where it might possibly make sense to use it, and
• in all the hyperlinks pointing to a page.

If you put the same keyword phrase in many of those spots, you might very well trigger a spam filter. Since it’s difficult to determine how many and
which combinations of those things might trigger the filter, the best advice
I can give you is to do your SEO without any particular formula in mind.
That’s how I’ve always done it and it’s always worked because every site is
unique and has different SEO needs.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to describe this type of SEO to others, as
people are always looking for the magic formula. For as long as I’ve been
doing SEO (over 12 years now), I’ve had it in the back of my mind that I
wouldn’t want to tip off the engines that my sites were SEO’d. This is one
of the reasons I’ve never used keyword-rich domain names or file names.
That’s probably the most obvious SEO thing you can do.

The most important aspect to being a good SEO is creativity. You shouldn’t
worry too much about the specifics of putting keyword phrases here and
there, and again over there. Not every page needs an H1 heading with
keyword phrases in it. If your page isn’t designed to use H1 headings, you
don’t need to change it to use one just for SEO purposes. And many images don’t really and truly make sense with a keyword phrase in their alt
attribute (alt tag). Don’t force one to be there just for the search
engines.

Most importantly for Google (and for your users), when it comes to your page copy and how you use your visible keyword phrases, less is definitely more. Please don’t read my Nitty-gritty report and then put the same keyword phrase in every single available spot on your page that you can find. My report is supposed to help you think about a few places you may have missed because you weren’t thinking about being descriptive when you originally wrote the copy. You can definitely have too much of a good thing.

A first paragraph on a page that has, say, 4 sentences, should not have 10
instances of your keyword phrase. It will look and sound dumb. I know that I have stressed this in my conference presentations and in our High Rankings seminars, but no matter how many times I say this, people don’t quite grasp the importance of working this way. If your copy reads poorly to a human, and does not come across as natural professional copywriting, the search engines won’t like it either.

When you do SEO, you don’t follow a guidebook. Think like a search engineer and consider all the possible things they might have to combat both now and in the future. Always optimize for 3 or 4 or even up to 5 phrases, and spread them out throughout the entire page. Never, ever, ever think that it’s the first paragraph that matters and stuff ‘em all in there. There should be an equal distribution throughout the entire page, and you should never use the phrases so much that you hear them constantly when you read it.

If you’ve done it right, an everyday user should not have any idea that a
page has been SEO’d. A trained SEO should be able to spot what your keyword phrases are, but it shouldn’t be glaringly obvious. Last, but not least, hire a professional copywriter to work on the important pages of your site. This is the best investment you can make for your site and your business. Even if you don’t want to hire an SEO, you absolutely MUST hire a
professional copywriter. You need someone who really and truly understands target audiences and how to speak to them about the benefits of what you offer. You can easily teach someone like that the SEO writing part.

Hope this helps to give you some ideas on how you might get out of
formula-SEO mode and start doing more creative SEO. More than ever, SEO is much more of an art than a science. The science is only a small portion of it.

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When Blockbuster first came out with their online movie rental service it was a joke compared to Netflix. I tried it out for several weeks and was sorely disappointed and quickly switched back. What was Blockbuster's problem? Essentially, they had no Unique Value Proposition. Blockbuster could not convince me, and many others, that their service was worth using over their primary rival, Netflix. But that's all been fixed.

For those of you using SiteCreatorPlus as your website platform and host you may find these tutorials a bit helpful. These tutorials will teach you about adding tables to your site and also how to set up an email forward to your gmail account.

Here are some presentations covering some common “how to’s” in SiteCreatorPlus.

Click Here to download the presentation in PDF format on Creating Good Looking Tables.

Click Here to download this PDF formated presentation on sending your Sitecreatorplus email to your Gmail account.

by Curtis Jensen