Government Services
Proprietary data, global reach and complete accountability for federal, state & global government agencies.
Learn More
Posts Tagged ‘page speed’
Site Speed Report Now Available In Google Analytics
John Vantine | May 6th, 2011
On Wednesday, May 4th, Google rolled out a new Analytics feature: Site Speed reporting. If you’re an Analytics nerd/data junkie like myself, this is exciting news. Back in 2010 (on April 9th, to be specific) Google announced what many of us had already suspected – that site speed is a factor in their algorithm, and can have a direct affect on your rankings. From that point on, more and more webmasters started to take load time seriously. The weight of page speed (as a signal) in the overall scheme of things was ripe for debate. Some SEOs seemed to feel that it wasn’t very significant, but this was mostly speculation. Regardless, it was established that it was something that people needed to pay attention to. Now that Google has implemented speed reporting directly into Analytics… Well, it’s pretty clear that everyone should be paying attention. Webmasters can use the Site Speed report to measure load times across their sites. So how is this useful? Well, beyond the obvious benefit of having this useful data conveniently available in your analytics account, you can now view it in the context of other analytics data. A few ideas: View load time by page type Compare load time by geographic location Compare load time by ISP Compare load time by browser/operating system Compare load times of different mobile devices Compare load time of users that have logged in vs those that have not logged in View load time of your top pages – especially Continue reading…
Tags: google analytics, google analytics beta, gtmetrix, page speed, site performance, site speed
Posted in Analytics, Google | No Comments
PubCon South 2011 Takeaways Round II – Pandas, Page Speed, Pennies & More
John Vantine | March 24th, 2011
That’s right folks, it’s time for some more PubCon South 2011 nuggets. I left Austin with notes on such a wide variety of topics that it’s hard to mold them into coherent posts, but I’ll see what I can do here. In this post I’ll be covering analytics, page speed, log files, content/the “Panda” update, and the JCPenney link building fiasco. I’m only presenting the info that struck me as being particularly useful or interesting… And it’ll all flow together beautifully. I promise. Ready? Let’s do this. Analytics and the competition How much SEO traffic is your competitor driving? Prashant Puri suggested using Compete.com to view your competitors referrers. You can specify if you’d like to view total vs paid search referrers, and from there you can determine roughly how much of their traffic is coming from organic search (total referrals minus paid referrals = organic search referrals). You can use another analytics data service like Hitwise to validate this data – the numbers should be similar. Google Analytics and user privacy On the topic of analytics – did you know that the Google Analytics TOS requires you to divulge your usage in your site privacy policy? “You will have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy and will comply with all applicable laws relating to the collection of information from visitors to Your websites. You must post a privacy policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that collects anonymous traffic data.” Nate Griffin Continue reading…
Tags: analytics, google algorithms, google analytics, jcpenneys, log files, page speed, site performance, the panda update
Posted in Conference Recaps, Google, Internet News, SEO | 5 Comments
Page Speed Now Officially One Of Google’s Ranking Factors
John Vantine | April 9th, 2010
According to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, site speed is now officially one of the signals in their search algorithms. Site speed is one of roughly 200 ranking factors that Google takes into consideration when looking at a site. While they’ve never come out and announced each and every factor, a well-versed SEO can make an educated guess at what many of them are. If you’ve been paying attention to the SEO blogosphere, you most likely knew that this was coming. Bloggers have been talking about it since last year, and Google reps alluded to it many times at SMX West. In 2009, Google released Page Speed, an open-source firebug addon that assists webmasters in improving their site’s speed. Many SEOs and webmasters realized that Google was making a statement by releasing this tool… They obviously wanted us to start thinking about the speed of our sites. The Page Speed addon will analyze a web page for you, and give you a list of optimization tips. All issues that are identified by the tool come with suggestions in order to improve/fix them. Here’s what the Page Speed report looks like: Firebug (a free Firefox plugin) is required in order to use the Page Speed plugin. A page speed report has also been available in Webmaster Tools (in Labs, “Site performance”) since late last year. This report provides you with a summary of your site’s speed over the past year, and will give you an idea of how your site ranks in Continue reading…
Tags: Google, load time, page speed, search algorithms, search signals, site speed, yslow
Posted in Google, Internet News, SEO | 4 Comments
My Notes From SMX West 2010 (Part Two)
John Vantine | March 10th, 2010
This is my 2nd post about the presentations that I attended at SMX West. If you didn’t see the first one, check it out here. There’s nothing better than getting your hands dirty with some advanced technical SEO stuff first thing in the morning, right? Those were my exact thoughts as I sat in the expo hall on Wednesday morning, dreary eyed with hot caffeinated beverage in hand. Without further ado… Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues Adam Audette (Audette Media) was the first one to speak. Adam spoke about SEO site audits, and reminded us that they should be a collaborative process. SEO Site Audits When multiple people are involved in a site audit, it can get confusing. It’s very important that everyone involved is on the same page; otherwise, you may find that you are giving your client conflicting advice/suggestions in the site audit. For this reason, he suggested the use of a project management tool like Basecamp. Everyone does site audit’s differently, but they should all include the same core elements. Adam identified these as being… On-Site: Domain(s), navigation, sections and categories, pages, and media (images/video/etc) Off-Site: Backlinks (quantity, quality, frequency), social media signals, cache dates/crawl frequency/indexed pages, and toolbar pagerank After identifying the core elements of an SEO site audit, he said that the “big 4 factors” are URLs, site architecture and navigation, deep pages (pagerank dispersion), and site latency. Gabe Gayheart (Razorfish) took the stage next, and continued the discussion on site audits. Gabe recommended that you Continue reading…
Tags: cctlds, content delivery, css sprites, link building, page speed, SEO, site audits, SMX West
Posted in Google, Internet News, SEO, Technology | 5 Comments
