Core Web Solutions Articles

Adding an RSS feed your sidebar from a respected site that updates articles frequently is a good way to add dynamic content and keep your WordPress blog fresh even when you don’t have the time to add new content. You see on the right sidebar of this site there is a section called “Web News” which does exactly that. This is accomplished by adding the default RSS widget to the sidebar in WordPress admin and putting the feed URL in the feed field.

Easy enough, but you may not want to let your PageRank juice leak off your home page to this site. Having a link that takes people off-site is enough trade-off for the right to use their content. You don’t need to give them your PR too!

*NOTE the following How-To is for webmasters who have full admin rights to their blog and have access to the source pages to edit. Those with Worpress.com blogs, this does not apply. If you attempt this please backup any edited file first in case you hose your blog. Some basic php editing knowledge is recommended.

The only file that will be modified is wp-includes/default-widgets.php

To make these links “nofollow’ and thus saving your link PR juice, you need to do the following:

1. Located and open for editing “default-widgets.php” in the “wp-includes” folder of your WordPress installation. (this is for WordPress 3.0, older versions had the code in “widgets.php” in the “wp-includes folder”.)

2. Around line 740 you will find the following code:

$title = "<a class='rsswidget' href='$url'
title='" . esc_attr__( 'Syndicate this content' ) ."'><img style='border:0'
width='14' height='14' src='$icon' alt='RSS' /></a> <a
class='rsswidget' href='$link' title='$desc'>$title</a>";

- Replace with the following:

$title = "<a class='rsswidget' href='$url'
rel='nofollow'  title='" . esc_attr__( 'Syndicate this content' ) ."'>
<img style='border:0' width='14' height='14' src='$icon'
alt='RSS' /></a> <a class='rsswidget' href='$link' rel='nofollow' 
title='$desc'>$title</a>";

The ‘nofollow’ attribute is added in two places as highlighted in green.

3. Find the next bit of code around line 862. Replace the following:

echo "<li><a class='rsswidget' href='$link' title='$desc'>
$title</a>{$date}{$summary}{$author}</li>";

– Change to:

echo "<li><a class='rsswidget' href='$link' rel='nofollow' title='$desc'>
$title</a>{$date}{$summary}{$author}</li>";

Again the highlighted ‘nofollow’ attribute is added.

4. Save and upload to your server.
5. Open up your blog website and test.

I recommend using a Firefox addon called “NoDoFollow” – which is turned on or off in the right-click context menu and will show regular (dofollow) links and nofollow links using color coded backgrounds. This way you can see ALL the links on a page and identify them for their ‘follow’ attribute.

Happy blogging!

Reciprocal links used to be the ‘cats meow’ for improving ranking of your website. They are much diminished in effectiveness these days, but they are still useful to some degree. The idea that reciprocal links cancel each other out like some algebraic equation is simply not true. I know this to be so because several of the sites I optimize have reciprocal links that show up in the Google backlinks check. They only show a handful of the total links back-linking to your site, but if these reciprocals were worthless Google would not list them. Reciprocals are still useful and can help boost your total back-link counts. The real issue is how they are done.

When looking to trade links with a reciprocal partner you need to wary of some dirty tricks or just plain bad ideas.

Bad Ideas

1. Discounted Pages – a page on a website called “links.html”, “resources.html” or similar may be discounted by the SE’s based on the file name alone. Why? Google is not stupid, that’s why. These file names are heavily abused, so even honest link traders can’t use them. So, don’t accept links for a trade on a page like that.

2. Just links – Even if the name of the file is something less telling than “Links.php”, if it is just a page of links, it can’t be very good. The best kind of link is a in-text link. One where the link to the outbound site is part of a sentence or paragraph. Being in a list of links can make the page discounted by the SE’s and render all the links totally useless.

Dirty Tricks!

There are many dirty tricks that some webmasters use to turn what appears to be a reciprocal link into a one-way link for themselves.

1. “NoFollow” Link – The nofollow attribute was implemented by Google to help eliminate link spam. What this attribute (supposedly) does is tell the search engine, “here’s a link, but don’t follow it, don’t count it as a valid backlink, and don’t pass any page rank (PR) to it.” This can be useful in controlling the “link juice” of your pages. Placing nofollow on links to certain internal pages of you own website can be a good idea if those pages should not be indexed by the search engines. Contact us, or login pages are the best example. This can also be useful with blogs and other sites where linksters like to spam comments with their links. Makeing them ‘nofollow’ will nullify the effectiveness and keep your blog clean.

BUT! For reciprocal link exchanges neither link in such an arrangement should be nofollow. Why? because its no longer an even trade. If a trade partner offers you a link with ‘nofollow’ activated, they aren’t playing fair. To check for this, I recommend two methods.

• Automatic – Mozilla Firefox has a plugin that automatically checks every link on the page for nofollow attribute. Every link will get a color overlay, purple or blue means “do follow”, pink means “nofollow”. So you can quickly see on any page if the link is a nofollow link.
• Manual – Using your web browser (firefox recommended)  you can look up the source code and find your link in HTML code. If it says, ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ in the <a> tag, then its no good. Firefox allows you to select a section of the page and then look at the source code for that section only. This is easier than scanning through the whole page.

One additional thing to watch out for with regards to the nofollow attribute; you need to check back in a few weeks and check again in a  few months to see if your trading partner double-crossed you. Some evil webmasters offer the trade with a dofollow link, but change it later figuring your won’t bother to check it again. Check it again, and again!  There are some link checking tools available on the web that can check it automatically. Just do a Google or Yahoo search.

2. NoFollow <meta> tag – Just like the nofollow links mentioned above, a webmaster can make an entire page “nofollow” by adding a <meta> tag called “robots”. In the <head> section of the page are <meta> tags which tell the search engines certain “extra” information that is not seen on the page in the browser. One of these is <meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” /> -This is  common, and as it is, is not a problem as it is telling the search engines to index this page and follow the links. But, one can change it to read <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” /> This version is telling the search engines to IGNORE this page. The major SE’s abide by this meta tag and will skip this page and not index it or follow any links on it. So, if this is done on a reciprocal link page it will render your back-link useless. Check the page you are going to have your link posted on for this <meta> tag.

3. Robots.txt block - This is the dirtiest of all. Many people fail to check this file, let alone even know about it. The above two methods are common, and many people already know about them so webmasters who want to play dirty, can’t get away with it. So, they came up with another way.. Robots.txt file. This file is intended to allow or disallow search engine bots (spiders) from accessing certain parts of your website. This is good if you have backup folders, or other files and folders that you do not want to show up in the search engines.

But, some evil webmasters will add a line to block access to the reciprocal page (or folder) so that the major search engines will not access it. The real trick here is that if you check for ‘nofollow’ links, manually or automatically with software, everything will appear kosher. Most people don’t think to check the robots file. But you must!

To check this file, it will be in the root of the website (http://www.thedomain.com/robots.txt). you can view it in any browser. Some sites don’t use it at all, so if it does not come up, its not there. When it does come up, you want to look for a line similar to this: “Disallow: /link-page.html “. This is telling the SE’s that they are FORBIDDEN from accessing this page; and the major ones listen. So Google or Yahoo won’t access that page and thus, your link will never be seen by the search engines.  ‘Pretty sneaky, eh’!

Well, I am sure there are other dirty tricks with reciprocal links used by evil webmasters, but these are the ones I have seen and check for constantly. Once again, checking for this at the time of the trade is good, but remember to check back several times to see if they have employed these tactics after the fact.

Hope this helps, good linking!

One of the primary tasks of SEO is generating backlinks. To do this right is no easy task for even seasoned experts. Its time-consuming, rigorous, and just plain hard-work. Often, such work is farmed-out to link-grunts who do all the tedious work for you. Over the past several years this work has evolved into such menial tasks as submitting links to thousands of free directories, blog comments, social bookmarking, forum posts, and article syndication. All these can be valid backlink generators, however; when these things are done wrong, they can backfire.

Let’s look at Free Directory submissions first. Seems reasonable to submit your site to free directories and generate some one-way backlinks. But can it really be that easy? If you pay someone $500 to submit your site “manually” to 1000 free directories are there any assurances that this method is effective? Even worse, are you sure that there is no negative impact for doing it? Even if you found a grunt willing to do it for $100, are you sure about this?

The answer is: you cannot be sure about any of it. You have no real idea what all these directories really are. Are they long-term, or temporary? Are the real, or fake? Its a gamble. In the worse case, some directories are bad neighborhoods, or penalized sites of which you have no way of knowing unless you research each one. If they are “bad sites”, you do not want to be associated in anyway. Why risk it? Do you really think search engines are not aware of all the garbage directories out there? This tactic is just throwing money away.

How about Blog Commenting? The idea here is that you can comment on many blogs and include your URL so that when the comment is published it generates a backlink. Sounds nice, but; its a load of crap. First of all, most blogs have “nofollow” comment backlinks, so your link is fairly worthless even if it gets published. Second, most REAL blogs will spam your comment if it is the typical meaningless generic nonsense like,

“I love your posts. This topic needs to be discussed. Thanks for the great blog!” (URL link: www.viagrasuperhugesale.com)

Do you really think blog owners who want to build a solid web blog will allow this nonsense? Third, any blog that is deliberately set up with “do follow” URLs in the comments and advertises to SEO forums that they are a “do follow” blog… are not real blogs. They are non-authoritative and built for SEO purposes only. Also, most of the “services” who do all this blog commenting for you do it on ALL worthless blogs. Don’t you think Google and the others notice phony blogs and phony comments? Do you think they are stupid? Do you really think you can fool them?

As for social bookmarking and article syndication, the same principle applies. Namely, creating a bunch of fake posts on a forum, making phony profiles on social sites, or syndicating the same exact article on a bunch of crappy article sites DOES NOTHING POSITIVE, and may even be negative.

Am I saying that these things at their core are not solid SEO tactics and techniques? No, actually they are. The problem I am pointing out is in the execution. It is human nature to want the fast-track, the easy way; and such phony methods serve that end. But, they pollute the Internet with SEO spam. There may have been a time when this sort of “backlink blitz” worked well, but that time is gone. All of these tactics are good only if they are done correctly. What is the correct way? Ahh… that’s for me to know, and you to find out.

Layout- Most of us are very experienced website visitors, we have seen thousands of websites in our lifetime. During this time we have learned how to scan a websites homepage to determine if the site is worth further exploration. Because of this you need to plan the layout of your site, if the site does not offer value to the visitor there is little chance that they will stick around. A quick way to turn people off is by overusing ads, if your website has more ads than content this is a huge turn off.

Don’t make people search for what your site is about. If your website is there to sell a product make sure that most of the links are teaching people about the product or leading people to information related to ordering the product.

Ease of Navigation- When you are thinking about how people will navigate your website, start with the basics. Start with a clean canvas and then add the most valuable points. Each of these points needs to have a link in highly visible location There should be an area where people can easily learn about your company, contact you and view what products and services are being offered. If these things are not easily visible to your visitors they may not find the best part of your site before they click off to some other part of the internet.

Make sure that your that the most relevant pages of your site have links to one another. If someone clicks on your products page there should also be a link there which will allow them to contact someone if they have a question.

Page Load Time- I’m sure that everyone reading this has had a time when they visited a website and the page load was just too slow, after a few seconds many of us will just give up. Remember that not everyone has high speed broadband access and often those that do may not have patients for a slow loading website. It is important to minimize the size of your web pages. Extras like large photos, Flash and ads are not needed and can cause people to never return to your site. Besides this Google is now beginning to put weight on search results according to their page speed download. It is understandable that search engines would want to serve WebPages that are more optimized than full of excess baggage. This is a very deep topic that will be covered in another article.

Browser Compatibility- What could be worse from a webmasters perspective than working to bring visitors to your site and they are not able to view the page or view it in a distorted way? If your website is not correctly setup you will have exactly this problem. How many users will you loose? Your site should display the same way whether you visitors are using Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Designing a successful websites can be complicated. However if you think like a consumer and use common sense it will help you to create an idea of how your users experience should be. By using these ideas you can make improvements to your current site or get an idea of how to setup a correctly layout site. Either way a website is a very powerful ally, jut make sure you set it up with some consideration.

Author

Phillip DeMassa is a staff writer for Core Web Solutions Web Design

What is a “content management system” or CMS?

CMS is a programming feature that utilizes a database to store the content of your website and displays that content seamlessly on the designated web pages. A simple user-interface allows non-technical people to access, add, or modify that content on the fly without need of special software like Adobe DreamWeaver® nor does it require any special web development knowledge or skills. All you need is a standard web browser and you can modify your own website easily and efficiently… not to mention the cost savings in not having to hire a developer to routinely update the site for every little change. You have the control.

How does CMS work?

CMS uses server-side programming and a database to store content information. The design is html and CSS implemented in the server-side code. The design structure can be interchangeable “themes” (out-of-the-box design templates) or custom web design done by a professional designer. A user can log into the administrative panel from any web browser and use the provided interface tools to manage, edit or add content including text and images.

How difficult is it to learn the system?

There are a variety of CMS systems available. Depending on the implementation, some CMS are simple to learn while others are complex and difficult.

How do I set it up?

There are many existing software platforms out there that provide all the programming and database functions right out of the box. These software have to be installed and configured on a website server.

What do you offer?

Core Web Solutions has discovered that most small business website owners and start up businesses are most concerned with user-friendly CMS at an affordable price level followed by a fast implementation and low learning curve. To meet this demand we have developed two CMS deals that cover all those concerns.

Contact Core Web Solutions for more information

You have the perfect idea for a website, you plan everything to perfection. Your ecommerce provider is setup, your website looks and functions excellent but you have one problem. There is no one knocking on your front door. More than a few people have faced this problem, but there is hope. By working to optimize your site for the search engines you can earn a stream of well targeted traffic, this will not happen overnight but if you are diligent it will happen. The more you know about optimizing your site the better you will rank in the search engines. There are some things to think about, like have you submitted your site to these searches engines, do you have any inbound links, are your SEO efforts completely ethical?

Are You In the Search Engines?

Your first efforts should be to make sure that you are indexed with the search engines. The 3 main search engines that you want to be focused on are Google, Yahoo and Bing, in this order as these are the most trafficked search portals.

If you want to check to see if your site is listed in these search engines simply go to the search engine and type in your domain name. If it doesn’t show up then your site isn’t indexed in their search directory. If this is the case you can submit your site for free, the main three search engines have provided pages where you can do this quickly and easily.

If your site has any inbound links then it will be automatically picked up and indexed when the web spiders index those inbound links. Web spiders “crawl” the Internet and update an engine’s internal database of links and sites.

Build Up the Links to Your Site from Other Sites

One way to build credit amongst the search engines is to have other websites linking to you. These links are seen as votes for your website, some search engines don’t look at Page Rank or links but the biggest search engine Google does so you may want to pay attention. The point is to have as many inbound links as possible, but it is actually more complicated than just links. These links range in authority from Page rank 0-10. You goal should ultimately be to have many inbound links as you can but from the highest page rank sites possible.

Next it is advisable to have links from sites that are in a similar market or sites that use similar keywords. Google likes to see that sites that are in the same “family’ as yours are sending you votes or links. Links from other types of sites don’t hurt, especially if they are high page ranking. Just keep in mind that it is optimal to have links from other sites of the same genre.

To find a list of sites that link to yours type this into Google search area: Link:yoursitename.com

If your site has many pages linking to it you may need to use a more advanced back link checking tool which you can find by doing an online search.

Keep Your SEO Campaign Ethical

In the drive to gain traffic to your website make sure not to participate in unethical practices. It can often have terrible consequences on your sites search ranking and possibly get you banned. Some people have tried to use sneaky tactics like a white background with white text. This white on white is use to hide keywords that will attract search engines. The problem is that search engines know how to detect this now, this tactic worked in 2004 but not today!

Do not create mirror site. Mirror sites are sites that look like your site but offer different content. One site is used to attract visitors through the search engines and then the other site is used to deliver a alternative message. This can get you banned quickly. Also you want to avoid suspicion by having a varying level of content, on indicator of false pages to a search engine spider is series of pages with nearly the same content.

Overall if you follow ethical rules while promoting your website and work to create content that offers something to the world you will receive more traffic and build your customers base. These tips are very important but there are even more things to watch out for, keep reading and searching for tips online.

Author

Phillip DeMassa is a staff writer for Core Web Solutions Web Design

If you have invested time and energy into your business website, chances are you want to use your site to earn money. The problem many websites face is a poorly laid out sitemap that will not convert visitors into customers. In order to have an effective website you need to anticipate the needs of your visitors, or potential customers. Many websites tend to push “selling” rather than addressing the actual needs of their visitors. Creating a website can be difficult; creating an effective one can be even more difficult. Let’s focus on helping you create an effective website with just a few important steps.

Initial Visual Presentation: Let’s face it, in this day and age most of us can not afford to advertise our product or service on television. However with the Internet we can provide our potential customers with a visualization of our product or service through our website. We all like to see what we are getting, sometimes it is easier to give to the customer a visual description with a well laid out series of photos that help to illustrate ideas in the customers mind. You may only get one chance to pitch to your customers so the more useful information, data and photos you can provide the better. Even if the user doesn’t buy today they will be quick to bookmark your site and return later if your site is of value.

A Free Stream of Traffic: Most website traffic is initiated through search engines, about 85% of it. Search engines allow you to target potential visitors to your site. This allows you to let them find you according to what they are looking for and ultimately this free traffic is the most profitable kind. Depending on your keywords and the market you are targeting, getting to the top of the search engine results can be a very competitive process. One of the best ways be found highly in the search results is to create optimized content on your website that is peppered with your desired keywords. This will help to create a stream of traffic to your website all for free!

Provide Relevant Content: Websites can be modified and edited at any time; there is no need to wait for material to be reprinted. By creating content that is relevant to your customers needs and updating this content you will create more incentive for your customers to visit your site often, this is one reason why Blogs are so popular, continuous fresh content.

Be Easy to Reach: One thing that sets apart websites is customer service. If someone is looking to buy they may have questions that need to be answered right away. If you are able to answer a customers question quickly, often you will earn a sale. One tip that website owners have learned is to create a live chat capability on their site, by speaking with someone live the user will often be more likely to complete a transaction. Whether you have a live chat option or an easy to use contact form it’s critical that you have some way for customers to reach you quickly.

There are so many benefits to having an effective working website that it is hard to cover all aspects here. You might already have a website up and running, but not getting the traffic you desire, with these tips you can begin to increase your conversion rate and boost your profits.

To have an idea for a website is just the beginning, the actual process of building a website that will hold people’s attention is an entirely different thing. Studies show that you have no more than 30 seconds to secure your visitor. If your presentation, site layout or content don’t grab peoples attention within that 30 seconds then its likely your website will not be running at full efficiency. There are ways to analyze your website. A proper look and feel should be your concern as you work to build your niche on the internet.

Let’s look at some ideas that you can reflect on while thinking about the design of your website. If you don’t have a website these are useful tips you can use while you work to create your own site. Did you ever think about your sites…

Web Site Tips to Increase Visitor Conversion

Layout- Most of us are very experienced website visitors, we have seen thousands of websites in our lifetime. During this time we have learned how to scan a websites homepage to determine if the site is worth further exploration. Because of this you need to plan the layout of your site, if the site does not offer value to the visitor there is little chance that they will stick around. A quick way to turn people off is by overusing ads, if your website has more ads than content this is a huge turn off.

Don’t make people search for what your site is about. If your website is there to sell a product make sure that most of the links are teaching people about the product or leading people to information related to ordering the product.

Ease of Navigation- When you are thinking about how people will navigate your website, start with the basics. Start with a clean canvas and then add the most valuable points. Each of these points needs to have a link in highly visible location There should be an area where people can easily learn about your company, contact you and view what products and services are being offered. If these things are not easily visible to your visitors they may not find the best part of your site before they click off to some other part of the internet.

Make sure that your that the most relevant pages of your site have links to one another. If someone clicks on your products page there should also be a link there which will allow them to contact someone if they have a question.

Page Load Time- I’m sure that everyone reading this has had a time when they visited a website and the page load was just too slow, after a few seconds many of us will just give up. Remember that not everyone has high speed broadband access and often those that do may not have patients for a slow loading website. It is important to minimize the size of your web pages. Extras like large photos, Flash and ads are not needed and can cause people to never return to your site. Besides this Google is now beginning to put weight on search results according to their page speed download. It is understandable that search engines would want to serve WebPages that are more optimized than full of excess baggage. This is a very deep topic that will be covered in another article.

Browser Compatibility- What could be worse from a webmasters perspective than working to bring visitors to your site and they are not able to view the page or view it in a distorted way? If your website is not correctly setup you will have exactly this problem. How many users will you loose? Your site should display the same way whether you visitors are using Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Designing a successful websites can be complicated. However if you think like a consumer and use common sense it will help you to create an idea of how your users experience should be. By using these ideas you can make improvements to your current site or get an idea of how to setup a correctly layout site. Either way a website is a very powerful ally, jut make sure you set it up with some consideration.

In search engine optimization (SEO), one of the most important things to do is acquire backlinks. Backlinks are simply inbound links from other websites to your website. These are important for many reasons, but did you know that backlinks can serve different purposes? Below I will discuss the most important purposes for acquiring backlinks.

Indexing Frequency

Often people are so focused on how to obtain one-way links in order to boost a site’s Page Rank (PR) that they forget a very important purpose behind the backlink. Indexing frequency relates to how often a search engine spider visits a site. The only proven method for creating more frequent visits by spiders is to have lots of inbound links. As most people know, the search engines come to your site by following links from other sites. The more links you have coming from other sites, the more often they will come. Therefore, with regards to indexing frequency, the more total links one has the more often the spiders will come. What this means is that there is still reason to get as many “whatever” links as possible. They don’t have to be related, or one-way. Unrelated reciprocal links that are ‘follow-able’ will serve this purpose well. That is not to say this is all you need to do. (SIDEBAR – Watch out for ‘no-follow’ links. These are useless because the SE spider will not follow it. It serves no purpose for SEO. Always maintain your list of links and keep an eye the ones that CHANGE to no-follow later. This is the new trick; offer do-follow links at first, then change them to no-follow later.)

Page Rank

This concept is often misunderstood. Google is the only search engine for which page rank matters at all. The key thing to understand is that Page Rank has little to do with where the site will rank on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It is rather a cumulative ranking based on other sites that link to your site. Page Rank affects page rank. The more higher-page-rank sites link to you, the higher your page rank can get. But… so what? This doesn’t directly impact your SERPs. However, to build page rank you need to find quality one-way links that have high page rank. So for this purpose, specifically targeted links are necessary.

SERPs

For the previous two purposes, related content is not very important. It is, however, extremely important with regards to SERPs. This has to do with where your site ranks in the search engine for specific keywords. It is the ultimate goal of SEO in the first place. Having good links from sites with related content affects SERPs more than anything else with regard to linking. Having one-way, contextual links work best for this purpose. A link coming from an “Authority” site of related content is supreme. Never mind all those offers to submit you to 1200 directories, or get 1000 blog comments and social bookmarks for you. That sort of rubbish “may” help with indexing-frequency, but certainly not SERPs. Only high quality links from related content sites will truly help your ultimate goal of stable SERPs top positions. Such links are definitely not easy to get, but only a few of these can make a great difference.

So, when evaluating your link campaign, you have to understand that you can do many things as long as you understand the purpose of what you are doing. Acquiring lots of random directory links and reciprocal links will increase spider visits. Seeking out high Page Rank sites will help improve your site’s Page Rank. And finally, acquiring valuable one-way related content links from established websites will help improve your SERPs. That’s all there is to it; easy, right? Not really.

A slow website can often lead to a poor user experience, people don’t like to sit around and wait for overweight web pages to download. If your website is serving up large photos, Flash intros or excessive graphics it can turn off your visitors and even cause you to lose customers. As you probably know this is not the best way to treat the customer and apparently now the search engines have figured this out as well.

As of April 4^th of 2010 Google announced that they are going to start evaluating page speed as part of their search determining algorithm. This means that if your website is optimized in many ways yet your homepage is a 300kb or larger sized download, you will be suffering with your Google search engine rankings. If you are currently ranking on the 4^th page for a desired keyword will cutting your page download speed in half move you up 1 or 2 pages? This remains to be seen. How much emphasis Google will place on this analysis of speed is still somewhat of a mystery.

Monitor Your Page Download Speed

Google offers an area for website owners that is know as the “Webmasters Tools”. In this area you can see many details about your sites ranking and search results on Google. In the webmasters tools areas there is a chart that is used to analyze and show to your websites download speed. If you are want to track the speed of your page downloads this is a great place to go to watch the change week by week. Google often is secretive about how their ranking algorithm. However the fact that they are offering an area to monitor your sites download speed is an indicator that this is an important part of optimizing your site.

According to Google they are evaluating page download speed to create a better user experience. This is understandable yet it does put certain restraints on people who want to display media on their website. If you have a site and you are in a competitive niche will you create a “plain Jane” site that is devoid of pictures and graphics? If you want to be highly competitive you probably will, although how much will this cost you in the end? If your site does not properly convey the right explanation and visual description, this can become a serious threat to customer conversion and profits

What does this mean for you? Reducing page download speed should be something on your mind as you work to optimize your site. It is definitely wise to double think hosting your own videos on the front page and using large image files. Now is the time to be more aware of these things, as the internet is becoming more competitive those who ignore the changes may be left out in the cold. If you are designing a new site these are some things to think about as you plan out your pages.