Website Speed Affects Rankings

Website speed is key to user experience, so if your site is slow, there is no reason to keep it that way. What's the use of getting traffic from search engines, when your visitors have to hang for 10+ seconds before they can see your content – they will have left much before the page has loaded. 

 If you want to improve website speed, there are a couple of steps to be taken. First, you need to measure your website speed – otherwise how do you know it's slow?  

 Measure Load Times

In order to measure load times, you need a good tool. The choice here is quite rich. Pingdom Page Load Time tool and Google Analytics Site Speed reports give a good idea of your site's general performance. WebPageTest is a more advanced tool because it allows to test your site in different browsers and spot slow areas on your site. 

 Move to a Faster Server

 One of the obvious reasons a site is slow is that the server you are hosting it on is slow. The reasons here could be numerous – from a web hosting provider that lacks the capacity to offer fast servers, to the type of your hosting account. 

OptimizeYour Site's Code and Images

Your server might be fast but if your site itself is slow, you will still experience speed issues. If your code and images are not optimized for fast loading, you won't see speed improvements till you fix them. This task could take a very, very long time, especially if your code and images are bloated but you've got to do it. For images, you can use compression and/or smaller sizes. This will speed loading big time. For HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other Web languages there are tons of tricks (and tools) how to optimize your code. 

The bigger problem with slow sites is that they are not user–friendly, which in turn kills conversions. If you don't want to lose money because of the speed issues of your site, take the time to fix them – it will pay in the long run. 

 

Google Releases Panda 4.2

Google tells  that it pushed out a Google Panda refresh this weekend.The rollout means anyone who was penalized by Panda in the last update has a chance to emerge if they made the right changes. So if you were hit by Panda, you unfortunately won’t notice the full impact immediately but you should see changes in your organic rankings gradually over time.This is not how many of the past Panda updates rolled out, where typically you’d see a significant increase or decline in your Google traffic more quickly. This Panda refresh is rolling out very slowly. Google said this affected about 2%–3% of English language queries.

SEO Audit

The main purpose of a SEO audit is to give you an idea where your SEO efforts have got you to so far. Without this knowledge, it makes no sense to perform any SEO activities, since you don't know what the return from them is. This is why a SEO professional can't do without occasional SEO audits.

Analyze Accessibility and Indexability

·         Analyze Robots.txt

·         Check 404 Errors and Redirects

·         Examine the XML Sitemap

·         Web Design/Development Audit

·         Check the Number of Pages Indexed by Search Engines

Analyze On-Page Ranking Factors

·         User-Friendly Site URLs

·         Page Content

·         Outbound Links

·         Meta Tags

·         Images

Analyze Off-Page Ranking Factors

·         Number and Quality of Backlinks

·         Position with Recognized Ranking Services

·         Presence on Social Media

Gmail's 'Undo Send' Option Officially Rolls Out

Every one of us has experienced an email blunder at some point whether it was accidentally hitting reply to all, sending a message to the wrong person or forgetting to attach a file. For example, I sent a cover letter to the wrong recruiter back when I was in college – which is likely one of the reasons why I did not hear back from that company. Now Gmail has rolled out a feature that lets you recall a message within 30 seconds of it being sent. Gmail originally launched the “Undo Send” feature in March 2009, but it was hidden as an experimental “Labs” feature.

“Previously a popular feature in Gmail Labs, and recently added to Inbox by Gmail, today we’re adding ‘Undo Send’ as a formal setting in Gmail on the web,” said Google in an announcement. Inbox is a mobile app for iOS and Android that keeps your email organized by highlighting important information and bundling similar messages.

In the web-based version of Gmail, you can activate the “Undo Send” option by tapping on the gear icon at the top right and selecting “Settings” from the drop-down menu. Under the general settings, make sure that ”Enable Undo Send” is check-marked. You will notice that the number of seconds can be changed between 5, 10, 20 or 30. I recommend setting up “Undo Send” for 30 seconds because 5 seconds does not seem like enough time. The “Undo Send” feature will remain activated for your account if you switched it on while it was still an experiment.

Unfortunately, “Undo Send” is not available for the Gmail mobile app. But Mashable reported Gmail is planning to roll out the “Undo Send” feature for the mobile app eventually.