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.

It’s been a long time coming but I finally had enough available time to move Inlet Media to the new branding designed by Joel at Peripheral Design last year. As a web developer its hard to keep your own site up to date. Working on client projects always takes precedent. Add in schoolwork, personal projects and life, and you get this redesign put forever on the back-burner.

The main idea behind the redesign was to create a new, cleaner, and more simple web experience. This new site features a much smaller footprint. More than half the content has been axed, and the content that does remain has been edited substantially. I had allowed my site to become filled with dead weight, that is now, thankfully, gone.

It has been a year and a half since this site was first launched, and I have learned a lot of new things since then. So while the user will have a much cleaner experience, there is a substantial amount of complexity in the background. I am using a lot of new techniques with this site and a lot of custom code has gone into building it. So please bear with my for the next couple weeks as I work out any kinks that may arise.

Please take a look around and let me know what you think.