How To Improve Your Web Page Load Speed

The tortoise may have outsmarted the hare in the race, but don’t be fooled into thinking that all slow movers win the prize. If images on your website load at the speed of a snail you’re likely to lose customers. Online images don’t need to be the size of a football field, so contain your need for gigantic piles of pixels. Reduce images to the smallest possible size that still maintains the quality and keep your customers browsing.  

Page load speed is incredibly important. A one second delay can cost your site as much as a 7% decrease in conversion rate. And on top of that, if your site is too slow, your Google rankings will be penalized.

Here are  5 of the easiest and most impactful ways you can reduce your page load speed.

1. Minimize the amount of HTTP Requests: Get rid of Javascript and CSS files you aren’t using or don’t need, combine graphical images into an image sprite, and get rid of any other external http requests on your page that aren’t completely necessary. Some sites have all sorts of plugins and widgets, remember each external request to individual javascript and css files slows your site down and costs you money.
2. Make all JavaScript and CSS calls External: Put all of your inline CSS styling and javascript into external files. The more of these you put directly onto the html page, the slower your site will be, not to mention this is very bad coding practice.
3. Combine external CSS & JavaScript into as few files as possible: 1 CSS file and 1 Javascript file should be your goal. This also ties to the first recommendation I made of making as few HTTP requests as possible, plus it is always better to have less external files to load.
4. Put Javascript file requests at the Bottom of your page: Move as many of your Javascript file requests as possible to the bottom of the page, hopefully you only have 1! This doesn’t give you a faster overall page load speed, but it does give the appearance of a faster load speed. The browser renders your website in direct order of the code, javascript files are generally not needed for the initial site presentation, so it is better to load them after the layout and images.
5. Optimize your images: Reduce all images to the smallest possible size that still retain’s the original picture quality. Use Photoshop or other services such as jpegmini.com to save images into a jpeg format and then reduce the size to the lowest possible value that still retains the same quality and crispness.

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How To Protect Your Online Reputation

Proactive Online Reputation Management Protects Your Company

 

 

The biggest problem with a company’s online reputation is it often remains forgotten until something bad happens. And, in today’s online world, one bad mark on your company’s reputation can go a long way; causing bad

press to pop up in every search that a potential customer performs.

Reactive online reputation management is available for situations like this, but it takes time. It is a lot easier (and much more effective) to proactively build and maintain your company’s online reputation, as opposed to going into recovery mode the second bad press hits the Web.

With the Web, it is all too easy for potential customers to run searches of their own. What are they finding when they search for your company? A good Internet marketing firm that specializes in proactive online reputation management can help your company keep a consistent image and put the best foot forward in search.

Own the Conversation
Social media interactions are overwhelming for many within the corporate realm. Not only do profiles need to be set up on a variety of social media channels, but ongoing monitoring and conversation starters are needed to help companies succeed and garner the best online rankings possible. For best results, the majority of the following should be monitored consistently:

• Your website and company name, and any other variations
• This one is often overlooked because companies only monitor their certified websites. Slight variations (or adding a .net or .org instead of a .com) can reveal sites dedicated to working against your brand and company image.
• Blogspot
• WordPress
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Scribd
• Quora
• About.me
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Tumblr
• Google+
• Wikipedia

And remember, it’s not just about showing up in these places — that is why an Internet marketing firm with an emphasis in proactive online reputation management is so important. These sites must be monitored and show consistent interaction for ranking purposes. If someone else is taking over a search for your company name — crisis or not — there is a huge problem in your company’s branding strategy.

Consistently Focus on the Good
All of these outlets mentioned above can be a great source for sharing good news. Good news can help build rank and increase interactions with established customers. This shows that your company cares about much more than the bottom line. These sites are a great place to let customers know more about your brand and build a strategic presence on the Web.

Social Media: If a Problem Arises, Address It
One of the biggest pitfalls of American’s increased Internet usage is that the Web is always on. This means that disgruntled customers are free to air their grievances any time of day or night. And, as a business owner, you should feel obligated to answer. Social media outlets are often the first place that customers turn to find an answer to a problem. Many companies take the first step of setting up several of their social media profiles, but they leave these pages unchecked — allowing comments and bad reviews to stack up against them. Social media mentions are currently built into the search engines’ algorithms and are ranking highly. This means that a proactive online reputation management campaign should be built to constantly and consistently monitor all online mentions to make sure that any problems are dealt with expeditiously, before too much bad press can come out.

Our world is interconnected and it is time that companies start living in this world and stop hiding their heads in the sand. Contact an Internet marketing firm to get a proactive online reputation management in place for your company today, and start 2014 knowing that you are covered.

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Google to Encrypt Search Worldwide

 

 

 

Google is delving into encrypting Web searches globally, beginning in China, a country known not only for its censorship of the Internet but the tracking of what its citizens are viewing online.

The search engine firm told The Washington Post the move is the beginning of a worldwide effort to offer its users more privacy while impeding government and law enforcement surveillance and foiling the efforts of hackers. Once implemented, the new measures will make it much more difficult for spies of any kind to view e-mails, search queries and video chats.

China was a logical place for Google to start its encryption efforts. The country’s censorship system, known as China’s Great Firewall, targets politically-sensitive content such as ‘Dalai Lama’ or ‘Tiananmen Square.’ With Google’s encryption in place, such searches will now appear as rows of indecipherable numbers and letters.

It is likely that Google encryption will next make its way to Vietnam and Saudia Arabia, which are also famous for their censorship of Internet searches. Such countries, of course, will have the option of blocking Google search rather than lose control of what their people are searching for.

“The revelations of this past summer underscored our need to strengthen our networks,” a Google spokeswoman said in an e-mail to the Post, referring to the revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“Among the many improvements we’ve made in recent months is to encrypt Google Search by default around the world,” spokeswoman Niki Christoff said. “This builds on our work over the past few years to increase the number of our services that are encrypted by default and encourage the industry to adopt stronger security standards.”

Google offered encrypted search as an option for some users in 2010 and made it the default setting for all users in the U.S. in 2012. The company also enabled HTTPS-only — a communications protocol for secure communication over a computer network — by default for all Gmail users three years ago.

But concerns over government surveillance, which reached an all-time high last year as documents made public by Snowden shone a light on the spying practices of the NSA, convinced Google to also extend its encryption to services other than search and Gmail.

It was reported last October that the NSA was able to furtively access the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers across the globe. The NSA’s penetration of the networks means the agency was able to see “who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video,” according to a Washington Post report.

The surveillance program, codenamed, MUSCULAR, was operated in co-operation with GCHQ, the British Intelligence agency.

Google, since then, has encrypted traffic between its data centers. A move followed by Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google has also beefed up security for its Cloud Storage as a free service to its users. Any new files added to Google’s cloud storage service are now automatically encrypted before being written to disk. Older files stored in Google’s cloud are gradually being encrypted and re-written to disk and users also have the option of encrypting their own data before writing it to cloud storage.

Google described the additional security as an extra step in its “commitment to evolve the security capabilities of our platform.”

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The Facebook Algorithm Change and Its Impact

Ask a business owner or marketer about the recent Facebook algorithm changes, and you’re likely to be met with a glare. The social networking site switched the way updates are seen with the aim of putting more high-quality content in newsfeeds and knocking out posts based on memes aimed at building cheap traffic. It was hard to argue with the theory, but in implementation it’s been borderline disastrous for many sites.

 

That’s because it’s not just the viral and meme sites that Facebook was targeting that have suffered. Businesses say they have seen their Facebook views plunge from what they were before the changes were put in place. Many have complained vocally, but Facebook doesn’t seem inclined to make any further tweaks.

Here’s a more in-depth look at the changes that were implemented and exactly what impact they are having on businesses.

What Facebook Changed
Every social or search site is constantly updating its algorithm to reflect the evolving nature of its audience. So when Facebook announced in December that it was making modifications, it was hardly a surprise. The social media site outlined the changes in a blog post, but they boiled down to:

• More relevant articles in newsfeeds: Facebook wants what shows up in your newsfeed to closely mirror your tastes. So, for example, if you have clicked on a lot of articles about a certain sporting team, content about that team is more likely to come up in your feed.
• Higher-quality articles: Facebook says surveys have indicated that people like to see articles with news or intellectual value in their newsfeeds, versus cheap photo memes on trending topics posted just to grab traffic. That also means fewer memes popping up in a newsfeed.
• Related content: After clicking on an article in a newsfeed, several other related articles now appear below it on your newsfeed, giving more information on the topic that you’ve just read about.
• Bumping up older content: People often comment on a status and then don’t follow the conversation any further because they forget about it. Facebook is now bumping up previous posts to the top of newsfeeds to give people a chance to reengage with a status after others have posted on it.

Why the changes? Everything boils down to engagement. Facebook doesn’t want people getting turned off by the memes from sites like Upworthy that keep showing up in their feeds just because they’re trending; the site wants content people engage with so that it can sell that engagement to advertisers.

Plus, Facebook takes its high-value concept very seriously. It wants to be seen by advertisers as a site that provides people with what they want, not a place where spammers go to play. That kills any sort of prestige that might attract advertising.

Declines in Organic Reach
Since the changes were implemented late last year, there’s been a backlash among businesses who say that their organic reach has taken a hit. Organic reach is basically the views that your content got without you advertising it. It includes people who saw your Facebook post from your page, as well as those who saw it on others’ pages (i.e., one of their friends commented on your status so it showed up in their newsfeed), plus viral views. Organic reach is separate from paid reach, which includes everyone who saw your content stemming from an ad.

The numbers seem to back up these complaints. For example, data culled by Moz from Edgeranker found that organic reach measured as a percentage of fans who saw a post fell from 26 percent in September 2012 to 7.7 percent in December 2013, when the new algorithm went into effect. That’s a huge dropoff.

Another study done right after the change was implemented found that reach plunged by 44 percent in the week after the switch. Surprisingly, only one page of the hundreds studied by Ignite Social Media saw organic reach rise.

Facebook has argued that while reach has fallen, engagement has actually remained strong. That backs up its argument for relevancy, meaning that it’s essentially trimming the fat. While fewer people may see your status updates, the ones who do see them are also the ones most likely to click or respond. And isn’t that the goal of any social media post? Still, businesses seem unconvinced that this is actually the case and argue they’re missing out on thousands of likes and shares because of the change.

How Businesses Can Increase Reach
Clearly it’s a bold new world of Facebook. Most businesses have spent the past few months kvetching about the change, but it seems unlikely to be abandoned anytime soon. Facebook made a few further tweaks in January 2014 to its policies to devalue text-only posts from businesses after noting that they generate less interaction than text-only posts from friends.
So how can businesses make sure that their posts are still being seen with all the changes? Here are a few ideas that should boost those sagging organic reach numbers:

• Make sure content is 100 percent unique. If lots of businesses are posting about the same subject, your post is much less likely to be seen because Facebook starts thinking you’re piggybacking on a meme. Whenever possible, post about a subject no one else is talking about.
• Try story bumping. Remember how one of those Facebook changes was bumping engaging but older statuses back into the newsfeed? Use this to your advantage. Post content that people are likely to comment on to get your status bumping back up into people’s newsfeeds.
• Include high-quality links. Quality content will always be judged kindly by Facebook. The better your link, the better the chance people will see it.
• Avoid text-only statuses. It’s easy to get lazy on Facebook, posting just a couple of words to give your page the appearance of activity. But asking “How’s everyone doing today?” won’t get you as much of that key engagement as planning out a post with pictures, video or other visual elements. Think of Facebook as a needy lover: The more attention you give it, the happier it is.

Making Peace With the Changes
Fighting an 800-pound gorilla is pointless. While it’s easy to complain about how Facebook’s algorithm changes have hurt businesses, it’s smarter to funnel that energy into figuring out what works best with this new system. Experiment with different approaches and keep a record of how your posts do. Soon you’ll figure out the secret to raising your reach once again.

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