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.

I recently had the privilege to work on upgrading a client’s website and after an initial run through the code I was horrified. It was strangely written and obtuse. For some reason each page was being displayed in an Iframe unnecessarily, etc. I then saw the culprit. It was built in Iweb, the built in Web Site Publishing tool by Apple as part of their ILife software suite.

The website looked good, it worked in all the browsers I tested, and it was even, to my great surprise. Standards Compliant.

I am a big supporter of Web Standards as a way to make the web a better place, but I also realize that any set of rules or standards can be gamed to the point of irrelevancy. Thats what this site was. Iweb produces nasty code that should only be used on a personal website. I am still amazed that the drag and drop interface of Iweb works so well across browsers and in such a rich graphical manner but when you start digging it gets really ugly. It also validates as XHMTL Transitional 1.0 perfectly, proving my point.

Validation as standards compliant is not and should never be the defining characteristic of quality code. A huge amount of other factors need to be considered when designing your website and obsessing over a validation is not where I want to spend my or my client’s time. Some of the web standards recommendations I don’t agree with and will break. The removal of the “target” attribute, for example, in the strict doctype is very annoying since this help controls how links work and is very important. There was no easy replacement for this functionality that was given.

Trying to get embedded youtube videos to validate requires rewriting the code even though it produces the same effect.

At some point the case for web standards comes down to a case of diminishing returns. It is easy to have a site validate when it is static and completely under the control of a web developer. If you add in a content management system of some kind and have users who don’t know web standards then it is just not worthwhile. Proper training is essential for the users but its not going to ever be perfect.

Standards are always the bar that I reach for with my websites; but for me, the real test of a website is everything besides that. Does it influence site visitors? Does it produce sales? Does the site have repeat visitors? These are the true criteria of success and ultimately what we are all after.