VIRGINIA SEO
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SEO
Search Engine Optimization encompasses a wide variety of techniques in which your website can be better tracked and displayed by Google (the largest search engine). Through comprehensive management your site can have the largest chance of succeeding.
CONTENT GENERATION With the recent Google algorithm changes, content generation, publishing, and blogging are the keys to ranking a site and driving traffic. Through careful management, your business can reap the benefits of constant content.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social Media Marketing is an important part of any business, large or small. As social media develops, businesses are finding new and innovative ways in which to sell products and attract customers. Can you afford to ignore a possible revenue stream?
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Your Website In The Fast Lane: Speedy SEO (Part 1) virginiaseo.org /blog/your-website-in-the-f ast-lane-speed-and-seo-part-1/ Adys Lynn Dill T his is the f irst part in a series on SEO and speed! You can see the second part here: https://www.virginiaseo.org/blog/your-website-in-the-f ast-lane-speed-and-seo-part-2 Tobias Noyes of colonialdrivingschool.com was recently contacted by a visitor to his website. T he visitor sent him a message along the lines of , “I recently arrived on your website and I noticed that it was a little bit sluggish and slow.” I have experienced the same things with my own blog and here are some tips I took to speed things up. He outlined a link that linked back to his blog and contained some inf ormation regarding speeding up a WordPress site. T his is a really thoughtf ul and helpf ul thing f or a random visitor to do, even if there were hidden motives (af f iliate marketing).
Speeeeeeeed So let’s discuss website speed and how it af f ects your search engine optimization. Your website speed af f ects two dif f erent areas of your search engine optimization, f irst it af f ects the user experience and is probably the biggest item on this list. When users arrive at your site, does it take your page a while to load? Are the pages and images loading seconds af ter the page itself loads? Does your page f lash up on styled bef ore the CSS stylesheets load up? What about your slider pager, are they slowing the other things down on your website?
The User Experience All of these things af f ect the user experience negatively- which is bad! Designing f or the user experience is your top priority not only as a designer but also as a search engine optimization savvy user. T here are some really great ways to test the speed of your website and one of the f irst and best ways is to… Browse the website. Send an email to your f riends and have them go and look over the website. Ask your visitors through comments, blog posts or f orums what they think about the speed of your website. Take all that f eedback and compile it together and get an overall picture of how your users actually f eel about your website. I was under the impression when I launch my website that it was f ast until our user spoke up and told me that it was slow. T his led me to investigate deeper and I realize that what I considered f ast and what my users considered f ast are not necessarily the same thing. Now that you have your baseline, depending on whether your website is f ast or not, there are a whole bunch of things that you can do to speed things up. T hese include things like modif ying the code, compressing images, using a content delivery network, or modif ying your theme. As a warning, some of these items may be pretty technical in nature, and not something average web user or small business owner will be able to do. All of these items should be something that your web designer can do, so if it f eels too technical f or you, just send a quick email to your web designer and ask them to take care of it. T here are
several categories that break the speed of your website:
Host ing Hosting is a very broad subject. Hosting is the actual Web server that’s running your website. T here is a wide variety of dif f erent hosting companies out there, and pretty much every website you see is going to be built of f of a dif f erent one. I could sit here all day and argue f or one host or another, but you are going to go with the host that you want or what your web designer told you to go with. I recommend BlueHost, and I do not recommend GoDaddy, to be honest. Your hosting provider has many dif f erent plans which you can purchase to host your website. T hese plans vary such as an economy shared plan all the way to a dedicated server. You can pay according to the amount of hardware you want running your website. When you go f or the budget host such as GoDaddy, you are getting a poor hosting package. T his hosting package has a direct ef f ect on the speed of your website. My website Virginia SOL was running on a deluxe plan at GoDaddy when I decided to switch over to a virtual private server on BlueHost. T he speed increase was visually apparent and by the numbers it almost tripled in speed.
Threes a Crowd Your hosting provider controls how many websites are shared with your website on your Web server. Dedicated servers do not have any other hosts on them and they also tend to be much more expensive. For a typical hosting plan like GoDaddy, there can be many websites alongside your own site on a Web server; this can lead to a slowdown due to the sharing of resources. T here is a tool available to check what websites share your server: http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/ . If you use this tool and run colonialdrivingschool.com, you will see that this site is shared on a GoDaddy server with over 1,000 other websites. If you run the same tool on VirginiaSEO.org, you’ll see that my site is on a server with nine other websites. T his means that I’m f ighting nine other websites f or my resources even though I have dedicated resources in my VPS. T his would lead you to believe that colonialdrivingschool.com is going to perf orm slower due to the sharing of resources by the hosting provider.
Host ing Hardware T here are a couple of other f actors that af f ect your hosting and most of these boil down to the hardware that’s packed behind your hosting. Most hosting plans have an administrative dashboard, and if you log in, you can see what sort of statistics your Web server is getting. If you look at GoDaddy’s shared plan, you might see things like 512 Mb or RAM, or 500 Gb bandwidth. T hese are all f actors that af f ect the speed of your website and the lower means slower. If you look at a virtual private server like mine, you might see specs like two gigs of RAM 5 T b of bandwidth. Your hosting provider might also use various types of hard drives. Some of these now of f ers solid-state drives, which perf orm f aster. T he location of your hosting provider also makes a dif f erence on its speed. If you’re hosting providers in China and you are accessing your website f rom America, things are going to be a little bit slower because every communication has to travel half way around the world. Another big item which controls the speed your website is the network cards your server has. Hosting providers of f er mega bit cards as def ault. T his means that the speed of
data going into and out of your website is limited to 100 Mb per second. Most hosting providers are now of f ering gigabit cards. T his is 10 times the pipe to transmit data into and out of your website. You can most likely get this with your current hosting provider, though they tend to be a little bit pricey.
Code Now here comes the big one. T he code of your website can greatly af f ect the speed of your website. If you have a well-designed slim coded website, it’s going to perf orm f ast. If you have a really bulky, very graphic intensive, heavy on JavaScript website, it’s going to perf orm slowly. If you use a content management system, it is going to add overhead to your website versus using plain HT ML. T his means that if your website runs on WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!, then you are using a content management system and this is af f ecting your site speed. Now, these content management systems themselves do not greatly af f ect your site speed but what does af f ect your site speed, in relationship to the systems, is the use of plug-ins and themes.
Themes T hemes tend to increase the code overhead of your website. When your theme designer designed the website typically they will create several stylesheets and link to them using various methods. T hese stylesheets load on every page and increase the overhead of your page. Also every time an element is added to the page, it increases the overhead of the HT ML. Furthermore when JavaScript is used to create animations or dynamically query inf ormation- this also increases overhead. So if your website is using this really, really awesome theme that looks great and it scrolls sideways and has sliding images and a f lashy graphics, this is probably af f ecting your websites speed. T here are many tools to test the speed of your website and give you a very nice report with actionable items that you can do to increase the speed of your website. Remember to check out part 2: https://www.virginiaseo.org/blog/your-website-in-the-f ast-lanespeed-and-seo-part-2
Adys Lynn Dill SEO Consultant at Virginia SEO Adys Lynn Dillis a mother of one and really enjoys spending time with her f amily. Besides taking care of her husband (the other baby), she spends her time doing graphic design as a part of the f amily business. T he Dill Design is a local web design company in Virginia, and they specialize in small business websites. Lynn also participates heavily with Virginia SEO, and is head of social media marketing, and a key member of the content generation team. Lynn enjoys social media so much that she is on it more than a normal person should be some days.