The Need for Speed in Site Performance and CRO: Time is Money!

A few weeks ago I blogged on the need for speed and enabling http compression within IIS and Apache. There have been recent posts on how http compression and crawl rate are related and how speed is now a ranking factor, albeit a small one. While crawl speed is important the effect of site speed on conversion rate can be far more devastating.

Recently we had a client that ran a live chat application that caused a load delay of around 8 seconds. We obviously got in touch quickly to let them know about the delay but they were unsure of the effect that would have. A load delay of this kind won’t affect the load speed for the crawler, (although WMT did pick it up which we will look at a little later) so really we didn’t have a leg to stand on, until we tested conversion rates. … Continue Reading

New changes could mean massive changes for SEO

Its been quite a month for search, including significant changes to the search engines pages, as well as a number of noticable acquisitions for the mighty search behemoth that is Google. In particular Google’s recent acquisition trail would tend to suggest very much a focus on search and social – something we haven’t seen recently with a number of Google’s acquisitions.

This would sugget that Google very much appreciate the threat of a united Bing/Yahoo alliance – a move I can’t help feeling still has a lot of mileage in it despite many recent studies suggesting that Bing wins have mainly been the expense of Yahoo (Neilsen and Holistic Search) – and that social contnues to be a medium to long term target – particularly if you look at three of the acquisitions made durint the last month alone – those of Like.com and Angstro in particular (and even more so if you look how some of Google’s past acquisitions are now coming to fruition – such as Android (acquired August 2005) and Doubleclick (April 2007 – and now being expanded to include natural search tracking)

However whilst those acquisitions suggest social may be an integral part of Google’s future, search remains a fundamental part of their present – and it is here where we have seen a number of significant changes and tests within the Google search pages. One of the most notable was that of the Google local testing results – where many of the Google organic results pages were limited and local/paid search results played a more integral part of these pages. … Continue Reading

The Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation

Last week Jeroen van Eck and Bill Slawski lamented the lack of a solid guide to image search optimisation. Bill threw down the gauntlet, and I picked it up. Here’s my Definitive Guide to Image Search Optimisation.

First, what do we mean with image search? Simply put it’s the vertical search option that allows you to search for images on the web. Google has an image search, and so does Bing, and there are several other specialised image search engines around.

For the purpose of this blog post we’ll focus on Google’s image search, though I reckon most of what follows can also be applied to other image search engines.
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State of Search news roundup – episode 6: Google realtime, Facebook killings, lawsuits and a job in the robots.txt

As every week we bring you news on State of Search, in a video and podcast! This week in episode six we look at Google Realtime search, Facebook killings, people suing and finding a SEO through a robots.txt.

Links to the related stories and a podcast download can be found below the video.

Enjoy and let us know what you think of the videos!

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Google’s acquisitions (infographic)

I’ve been thinking about what would be a nice infographic to make, one which actually had some use, next to getting the link attention for which many of them were made. One I did think of is an overview of all the Google acquisitions, since Google is currently buying more than a company a month. Well, someone beat me to it: scores.org. They made a nice overview which, in contrary to others, also tries to look at the usefulness of an acquisition. Judge for yourself (after the read more)… … Continue Reading

State of Search radioshow – episode 23: SES SF recap and new Google products

After a week without a show Bas and Roy returned to do another great show. They were joined by fellow blogger Bastian Grimm who covered SES San Francisco for State of Search. Bastian discussed the quality of SES San Francisco and gave some highlights of the show. They even got someone from the chatroom in the show to give his view on SES!

After the break Bas, Roy and Bastian discussed Google live updating results, which Rob Ousbey discovered last week and the possibility of getting more results from one domain now Google has changed their algorithm on that.

The shownotes are below. … Continue Reading

Six Ways to Increase Internal Links

Be honest with me… how often does this happen?

“Yes hello, we’d like to buy some of your optimisation please. We have the business idea, clear objectives, brand values, and loads of shit-hot original content of all types. We’d like to get you involved right now, before the design RFP goes out and we’d like you to advise on everything from choice of domain onwards.”

I suspect the answer to my question may be “never.”

More often than not we’re engaged as online marketers somewhere down the line and we inherit a website or business that whilst functional; might not be optimal. Not every client or business has a web team or a generous budget for an extensive re-build, so at times we may find that we’re making do. In such situations there are two areas I find most sorely in need of attention and these are Information Architecture and content. In this case I wanted to look at some ways to boost internal linking for when the site Information Architecture isn’t ideal. … Continue Reading

Google universal ranking factors: an overview of resources

Google is much more than a search engine that searches for the best webpage to fit your request. Over the years they launched many different vertical search engines like Google News, Google Books and Google Places. More and more results from those vertical search engines tend to appear in the regular search results, creating universal (or blended) search results pages.

Because these universal results can replace regular results and ofter are placed above the regular results SEO doesn’t focus on organice results alone anymore. You need to optimise for the vertical search engines as well. All those different search engines require different approaches for ranking in their SERPs, in this article I try to make an overview of the most valuable information for ranking in Google’s universal search engines. … Continue Reading

Ways of keeping up to date with (the) State of Search

You can easily say State of Search is everywhere. We write great content here, share other content on Twitter, cover events give you insights, news in our weekly news roundup and we even have our own radioshow on Webmasterradio. Thats a lot to keep track off! But luckily the ‘social web’ has all sorts of possibilities to keep you up to date. But sometimes it can be “handy” to have an overview of all the things you can ‘subscribe’ to. So here’s a quick overview of all the places you can find State of Search delivering great content for you:

RSS:
subscribe in your reader

Twitter: @state_ofsearch
Follow us on Twitter

Facebook:
become a fan of our Facebook page

Google Pages:
ad us to your Google Pages

Our YouTube channel:
Stay up to date with our own videochannel
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