Have you ever considered how the loading time of your web pages might impact on your search engine rankings?

Both Google and Yahoo! have commented on this issue recently, so it might be a good time to take a closer look at how long it takes your web pages to load.

Google’s position on the issue has always been that the time taken for a web page to load does not have any impact in their ranking algorithm – until now! As part of their initiative to “Speed Up The Web“, Google have stated that page load times might possibly become a consideration in the future.

Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that, “We want the web to be faster and we want sites to load more quickly”, so it’s very possible that, in the future, Google could consider rewarding fast loading websites, via improved search engine results.

Take a look at what Matt Cutts has to say about the topic below:

Another interesting development has come from Yahoo!, who recently filed a patent with regards to web page loading times.

Their Patent Abstract summary states the following:

“Methods and systems are provided that may be used to characterise in some manner the performance that a user may experience when accessing a web document.”

The patent application goes on to discuss establishing some kind of “user experience information” which could be used to rank search results. Obviously web page load time will play a big part in the user experience, so this would be a contributing factor.

The patent application states:

“For example, information relating to whether a user might abandon or wait for a web document to be displayed may be useful when establishing certain quality or relevance factors for the web document.”

As both Google and Yahoo! appear to be placing increased relevance on the issue of page load times, it might be a smart move to ensure that your website has been optimised to load as quickly as possible, ahead of any potential changes to the search engine algorithms. Your Web Site Designer should be able to help you with this.

Apart from helping to make your site more search engine friendly, any improvements in speed will definitely help to improve your sites appeal to your visitors as well as improving your Web Page Optimisation efforts.

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A study of the global state of broadband has put the UK 25th out of 66 countries in terms of the quality of its networks.

The research for Cisco found that countries such as Latvia and Bulgaria were better prepared than the UK for next-generation net applications.

The UK was listed among countries whose broadband is “meeting needs for today”.

Korea and Japan continue to dominate the league table, largely due to their commitment to fast networks.

LEADERS IN BROADBAND QUALITY      

South Korea

Japan

Hong Kong

Sweden

Switzerland

Netherlands

Singapore

Luxembourg

Denmark

Norway

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/8282839.stm

Published: 2009/10/01 00:20:06 GMT

Google has a 60% share of search queries in the U.S., but that number is 67% worldwide, according to ComScore. In many top and growing internet countries, including Germany, Canada, Brazil, Turkey and Italy, Google has more than 80% of the search market.

So, how are the search wars playing out abroad?

Very well for Google, as the following international data from ComScore show. Note that this data does not include China, where Baidu is dominant and Google is frequently blocked by government censors.

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According to a recent post on WebProNews, Microsoft has admitted a problem with Bing whereby pages marked as NoIndex or NoFollow are being ignored by the ‘MSN Bot’ when crawling a website.

NoIndex and NoFollow Meta Tags can be used to advise search engine spiders to avoid indexing specific web pages. There are a number of reasons why you might want to use these tags, such as preventing duplicate content, or private or non essential web pages from being indexed.

The industry standard NoIndex and NoFollow Meta Tags are recognised by all major search engines including Google and Yahoo. Therefore this problem only appears to be affecting Bing.

According to Brett Yount from Bing’s webmaster team, Bing have acknowledged that there is a problem.

“This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve. If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as, http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*

Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.”

So, if you have pages within your website that are using these NoIndex Meta Tags, I would strongly recommend checking these pages in the Bing search results and taking appropriate action to establish if they have been indexed in error.

If you would like further information on how to prevent search engine spiders from indexing your web pages I would recommend you review other methods supported by the Robots Exclusion Standard.

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Internet Banner Advertising and Search Engine Advertising  are very different online marketing models.

Search engine advertising (commonly referred to as pay per click advertising) offers a very basic form of presentation, in as much as the content of your advertisement is restricted to text only and a limit is placed on the maximum number of characters that can be used per line. The maximum number of lines are also restricted.

Search Engine Advertising has limited text available to promote your product.

Google for example will only allow 3 lines of text plus your URL. The first line is reserved for the title of your advertisement and is restricted to a maximum of 25 characters. This is followed by two lines of description, each restricted to a maximum of 35 characters per line. Obviously this limits the amount of information you can use to promote your product and you will need to consider the content of your advertisement very carefully.

This type of text based advertisement will only allow you to promote a small number of product benefits and offers only limited value, in terms of promoting and increasing the brand awareness of your product or service.

If the criteria for measuring the success of your advertising campaign includes both brand awareness and sales achieved, then web banner advertising offers a more flexible solution.

Internet Banner Advertising allows media rich display advertisements.

Internet banner advertising campaigns will enable you to use media rich, banner display advertisements. Web banner advertising design can include your logo, your corporate colours, flash animation or even video. Internet banner advertising campaigns allow you to promote your brand image in a similar way to offline advertising, except that the creative content can be more dynamic and interesting. For further information take a look at a selection of  our Banner Design examples.

Obviously you will need to factor in the creative costs of producing your web banner which will be significantly more than the cost of creating a simple text based advertisement. However, in my opinion, the brand building benefits of running a media rich, web banner advertising campaign, far outweigh the cost of production.

Web Banner Advertising campaigns can include a wide range of different banner shapes and sizes.

Most internet banner advertising networks will accept a wide range of different sizes and shapes of web banners and there are no restrictions on the amount of words/characters you can use in your message. The most common banner sizes used for internet banner advertising campaigns are as follows:

• Banners (468×60 pixels)
• Leaderboards (728×90 pixels)
• Skyscrapers (120×600 pixels)
• Rectangles (300×250 pixels)

Search engine advertising (Pay Per Click Advertising) has proven to be a very popular method of online advertising, as the advertiser only incurs a cost when a potential customer clicks on the advertisement and visits the advertisers website. What is not so well known is that internet banner advertising campaigns can be purchased on exactly the same basis. The average cost per click for web banner advertising compares very favourably to search engine advertising. Depending on your industry category you may find that internet banner advertising offers a considerably cheaper alternative.

For further information on web banner advertising, take a look at my article, HOW DOES INTERNET BANNER ADVERTISING WORK?

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