Blog SEO Expert » Usability

How to improve SEO by reducing your page load time

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:56:04 +0000

High page load time = Bad SEO

In “How the page load time of your blog or website impacts SEO”, we saw that a high page load time frustrates your users.

This results in bad user experience, which ultimately leads to lower ranking on the SERPs.

What increases the page load time?

There can be many culprits that contribute to a high page load time.

You can improve on most of the factors and thus, can improve the page load time. However, there isn’t much you can do for certain other factors.

Let’s have a look at the things that affect your page load time.

Reduce Page Load Time For SEO

Images on the webpage or post

Images are the biggest culprits in increasing the load time of your web pages. Both the size and number of images matter.

(Image source)

Here are a few tips as far as images go:

Try not to have too many images in a post: 1 or 2 are just fine, unless you write about photography!
Try not to have very large images in your posts: Larger the size of the image, the larger would be the file size. And the longer it would take to load.
Actually resize the image, not just through HTML attributes: If you find a large image (say 1200 * 800), and want to display it only as a small image (say 500 * 333), don’t just use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes of the IMG tag to reduce the display size. Reduce the image dimensions physically using an image editing tool, as that would reduce the size of the image (and therefore reduce the loading time).
Optimize the image for web usage: Use only properly optimized images, as they are smaller in size. At the least, try to reduce the color depth as long as it doesn’t impact the way the image looks.

External scripts

Many of us put lots of scripts on our blogs or websites. These can be visitor tracking scripts (Google analytics, Sitemeter, etc), advertising scripts (Google AdSense, Chitika, etc), or some other scripts.

Of course, these scripts serve a purpose. However, refrain from having too many of them. These scripts call some function on another server, and are therefore inherently time consuming.

The higher the number of such scripts on your blog, the longer it would take to load. So, limit the number of scripts on your blog to reduce the load time.

Badges and Widgets

Various badges and widgets also call some remote server, and therefore reduce the page load time.

Is it necessary to show a badge of ALL the networks that you participate in? Is it not enough to show just a few? Similarly, is it necessary to have a lot of widgets on your blog?

Various badges and widgets not only increase the page load time, but also distract your readers from the content. This impacts the user experience negatively. (Remember, good user experience means good SEO).

Therefore, try to have only a limited number of badges and widgets on your blog or website.

Flash and Multimedia files

Flash and multimedia files (like video and audio files) are large in size, and naturally take a long time loading.

Again, reduce the number of these files in order to improve your page load time.

HTML Size

People use different softwares to create HTML files. Most software work just fine, but some (like Microsoft Word) create HTML files that are HUGE!!

Try to avoid creating HTML files using such software, or use some tool or utility to trim the HTML code created by such a software.

This would reduce the file size, and improve the loading time of the web page.

Server Load

Another reason for a high page load time can be the load on your server – if the server is getting too many requests to service, it would slow down considerably. This happens mostly on blogs and websites using a shared server.

There is not much you can do in this case – you can either shift to a better hosting provider, or can upgrade to a dedicated server that hosts only your blog or website.

Conclusion

Follow these tips, and the load time of your web pages would improve drastically. This would improve the user experience on your blog, and would therefore result in better SEO.

How the page load time of your blog or website impacts SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:58:24 +0000

Page Load Time And SEO

How page load time impacts the user experience

Have you ever been to a blog or website, and felt frustrated because it took ages to load? This isn’t very unfamiliar, right?

Such an experience can be really frustrating. And it is more than likely that you wouldn’t want to visit that blog again!

This is a clear demonstration of the fact that a high page load time adversely impacts the user experience on your blog or website.

(Image source)

Today, we want everything fast. We want everything right now. And with an increase in the speed of our internet connections, we want web pages to load instantly as well.

What is an acceptable page load time?

So, what does “instantly” mean? Is it 1 second, or 15 seconds? What is a good page load time?

Of course, a lot depends on the personal preference (and tolerance!) of the visitor. However, we can have a simple rule of thumb.

I would say that a page load time of about 10 seconds on a 128 Kbps internet connection should be acceptable in most cases.

Page load time and SEO

We know that search engines are paying a close attention to the user experience on your blog or website. Therefore, it is very important to improve the user experience of your blog in order to improve SEO.

The equation is simple:

High page load time = Frustrated visitor = Bad user experience = Bad SERP rankings = Bad SEO

As a corollary,

Low page load time = Happy visitor = Good user experience = Good SERP rankings = Good SEO

Simple, isn’t it?

To know how to reduce the page load time in order to improve the SEO, please read “How to improve SEO by reducing your page load time“.

Better user experience for better search engine rankings

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:57:29 +0000

Evolution in Search Engine Algorithms

Search engines have come a long way in the last 15 years.

There was a time when the search results were totally dependent on on-page factors – primarily, the keyword density. (This led to blackhat practices like keyword stuffing).

Then, the search engines became more intelligent, and started giving more credit to offsite factors – like incoming links. This trend was started by Google. (This led to practices like link exchange or reciprocal links and link purchase).

The next step in search engine evolution was contextual sensitivity – search engines started looking at the overall context of the webpage and the website (or blog) , and started evaluating the keywords in light of this.

They also started evaluating the content and topic of the sites providing the backlinks, and started giving more importance to backlinks from websites about a similar topic.

This move towards contextual sensitivity drastically improved the quality of results on the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Now, it is time for the next step in search engine evolution.

Arrival of “User Experience” on the SEO scene

“User Experience” is the mantra for the next stage of search engine evolution.

Let’s remember – providing good content to searchers is the primary goal of search engines.

And when we say good content, it is not just the written word on the blog or website. Good content means easily readable, easily navigable, error-free on-topic content. This, over and above the written word, is what “User Experience” comprises of.

Since search engines have started giving importance to the overall user experience of blog or website visitors, it makes tremendous sense to improve the experience of your users in order to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Factors impacting the user experience

There are lots of factors that impact the overall experience of the readers of your blog or website. The best part is – almost all of them are totally in your control!

In the coming weeks, we would discuss each in detail. Stay tuned!

Get the “User Experience Analysis Report” for your blog / website

Want to improve your readers’ experience at your blog / website for improved SEO? Want to know how your blog / website fares when it comes to user experience?

Order the “User Experience Analysis Report” today! It’s a great PDF report that contains the evaluation of your blog or website from the user experience point of view, and provides tips on improving it.

All for just $19.99!

For more details and ordering, check out User Experience Analysis Report.

How to reduce bounce rate on your blog and improve SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:41:38 +0000

Reduce Bounce Rate

High bounce rate hurts your SEO

When a visitor sent to your blog or website by a search engine bounces, it means that he did not find what he was looking for at your blog or website.

The search engine views this as a vote against your site, and pushes your blog or website down on its SERPs!

(Image source)

(Check out “Reduce the bounce rate, improve your SEO” for more details on this)

How to reduce the bounce rate

There are a few simple things that you can do in order to reduce the bounce rate.

The question that needs to be asked is: Why do visitors bounce? It can be because:

They did not find what they were looking for
They found what they were looking for, but still didn’t see any other page or post

Well, there isn’t much you can do for the first. At times, your blog or website can come up in the SERPs for irrelevant searches.

(For example, my post “Keyword density – What is right, what is wrong” often comes up in the SERPs for the search term “What is right what is wrong”. Now clearly, this post is irrelevant for the people searching for this term – and they mostly bounce)

But there are some things you can do for the second category of people.

1. Have meaningful internal linking of posts

The idea here is to have various means of highlighting the content of your blog to the visitors.

Maybe you can have a list of related posts at the bottom of each post, or you can have a “people who liked this post also liked” type of list.

This way, your readers would come to know about other content of your blog or website without having to search for it.

This would increase the chances of them reading more than just one post or page on your site, and therefore, decrease your bounce rate.

To know more about different ways of highlighting your content, please read “7 ways to implement internal linking of your posts for better SEO“.

2. Have a welcome message for visitors

Now this is a little extra that you can have for your search engine visitors.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could present a customized message to the visitors from search engines, and highlight your best posts there?

The good news is that you can! You can show a message specifically to search engine visitors, and list your best posts there. Or, you can list posts that are relevant to the search terms used by the visitor!

There are many plugins available for this for various blogging platforms.

What not to do to reduce the bounce rate

We saw the ways of reducing the bounce rate – using these techniques, you can decrease the bounce rate meaningfully.

However, many people try to reduce the bounce rate artificially. Some examples:

“Click for more” or “Read more” links (on pages other than archive pages)
Posts broken into multiple pages, each page containing just a few paragraphs

If at all, these methods would artificially decrease your bounce rate. However, it is more likely that visitors would get annoyed by this, and would never come back!

My advise – stay away from these, and employ only genuine ways of reducing your bounce rate.

Reduce the bounce rate, improve the SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:04:40 +0000

What is bounce rate?

When a visitor comes to your blog or website, either on the homepage or on some post, and leaves without seeing any other webpage, it is called a “bounce“.

In other words, a “bounce” is a visitor that leaves after seeing only one webpage on your blog or website.

And the percentage of people “bouncing” off your site is the bounce rate.

Bounce rate = Number of visitors seeing just one page * 100 / Total number of visitors

A visitor sent by a search engine bounces…

When a visitor bounces, he or she can either be hitting the “back” button, or can type another URL in the address bar and move on to that website.

Visitors coming from search engines and bouncing off by hitting the “back” button is something that you should be concerned about.

This is because search engines like Google have started noting such behavior. When your visitors do this, search engines notice that they sent you a visitor, but the visitor bounced and came back to the search engine to look for more results.

And how a search engine interprets it – Impact on SEO

This implies that this visitor did not find what he was looking for at your blog or website. In other words, it means that the visitor has voted negatively for your site.

What does this indicate to an intelligent search engine like Google? That your blog or website is not very relevant for the search term that the visitor used!

And guess how the search engine would react? It would push your blog or website down on its SERPs for that search term! Now this is SEO disaster.

How to remedy this?

Of course, bounce rate is only one of the many factors that search engines consider.

However, with SEO, little things add up. So, the only option for you is to reduce your bounce rate.

To know the different ways of reducing the bounce rate, please read “How to reduce bounce rate on your blog and improve SEO“.