Google is obsessed with speed, and I admire them for that. Speed has always been an important metric to consider with your site because it improves the user experience. No one wants to be patient, even if it is virtuous. Users want the site now, and studies have shown that speed does impact their experience on your site.
If that isn’t enough for you, Google has officially announced that website speed is now one of the factors that go into their search engine ranking. It is only one of 200 such data points that Google analyzes your site for, but expect a lot of advances to be made in site performance soon. No SEO company will want to be left in the dust on this one.
Websites not optimized for speed can also increase your hosting cost. Optimized pages are smaller by definition, so less data is downloaded per user. If your site is being visited by thousands of people a day then speed optimization will save you money. This is a no-brainer that helps your users, your ranking, and your wallet.

At Inlet Media, I had not thought much about speed. I always optimized graphics, but have allowed other large files to grow. The initial analysis of this site showed that there were significant improvements I could make. This is a new metric Inlet Media will be using during the web design and development process, and I will be including it as a standard SEO service.

Hurrah for speed!

A common error I see website owners make is something I call, “The Content Vomit Effect.” Website owners want their site to be crammed full of information. They want their photos, their videos, their articles, a detailed life history, and dog photos. The power and ease of web publishing captures them and they find a reason to post things. The problem is, this information is often irrelevant. It misses the point of their website completely and is detrimental to it’s long term success.

Less is More

The top spot on Google is a coveted position, and the competition for that spot varies wildly depending on the industry, and the keywords targeted. As you can probably guess, the top spot for web design companies, and SEO firms is under intense competition, one I am actively engaged in. A simple strategy to help boost your SEO position, and one I have used extensively on my recent site redesign, with great success, is to simply dump content and focus on only a few, core pages. The less you have, the better off you are.
Attempting to optimize every page of your website is a chore, especially for small businesses. You add in the fact that inexperienced people will often be making updates and your site soon becomes an ineffective mess.

Post Hesitantly

Focus on just a few core pages, and post new content hesitantly. Ask yourself. “Is this going to be useful to my users?” If you cannot answer this question with a definitive, “Yes!” Then don’t continue.

We are naturally inclined to write and talk about what we know, and what we care about. Embrace this inclination but be sure focus on quality over quantity. One of the biggest SEO facts to internalize from Google Engineer Matt Cutt’s interview I discussed in my last post, is that only good pages are indexed by the search engines. As you plunge deeper and deeper into a website, the likelihood that it is analyzed, drops precipitously.

There is nothing more depressing than spending your valuable time creating content that users never find, Google never indexes, and actively wastes your time. Just don’t post it. Spend that time building links, and optimizing the pages you currently have. You will have much more success and more sanity as well.

This past week Matt Cutts, who heads up the Webspam team for Google was interviewed by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting. The long and detailed interview transcript can be found here and is a tremendous resource. For the average website owner here are some of the key things to take away from it.

The number of pages crawled is roughly proportional to your PageRank.

Every website is crawled depending on the PageRank of each page. PageRank is the overall score that Google gives the page for how relevant and useful it is. The front page of your website, which often has the highest PageRank is almost always indexed because it is has the highest PageRank. When the Google bot that indexes and analyzes your site sees a link from your highly ranked page to another page, it follows. When it reaches that page, with a lower PageRank, it loses interest. It then loses interest progressively as it travels through your site. When the PageRank drops too low, it stops.

Complex navigation structures are hard to index and should be avoided.

Your site navigation needs to be simple and shallow. By shallow, I mean that there has to be less than 3 layers of navigation for every page on the site. If a user has to click through seven links to find what they are looking for, then the user experience and your SEO will suffer. The Google bot can only do as much as an average user. They don’t have super powers, so keep it simple.

Duplicate content is still bad, but not as bad as we thought.

It is widely believed that duplicate content is not just a waste, but a cancerous tumor, eating your search engine ranking. This isn’t exactly true. Search Engines expect duplicate content, to an extent, and when they see pages that are similar or copies they merge them together. As long as the amount of copied content is not excessive, your site won’t be penalized. You will still be wasting the Google bot’s time and your PageRank. Avoid it, but some overlap is not the end of the world.

PDF files and other Non-web native formats are indexed.

Common file formats like PDF, Flash, and Word documents are indexed by the search engines. These items are harder to index and won’t be considered as valuable as a normal .html document, but it is good to know that this valuable data does not go to waste.