Website Performance Traps

Website performance is important from two perspectives: the web spider’s and the web
user’s. If your site has many thousands of pages, you will want to make sure your site
response times are reasonable.

Web spiders are busy creatures. If any of your dynamic pages are computationally
intensive, the web spiders might give up waiting on your page to finish loading. In
technical terms, this is called timing out on a request.

Dynamic pages aren’t the only issue that will cause a web spider to give up. If your
website is running on a server that is hosting many other sites, it may be slow to respond
because of the overwhelming load caused by one of the other sites. As a result, your
website might take many seconds to respond. Another problem could be with your
web host if it experiences network latency due to limited bandwidth.
You can do some things to remedy these situations. The basic idea is to speed up page
transitions to any web client, not just the web spider. Consider using the following:
• Web server compression
• Web page caching

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Integrating FeedBurner with your site

Integrating FeedBurner with your site is relatively simple.
You can think of FeedBurner as your website’s feed wrapper service to make your
feed more compatible, more visible, and more easily tracked.

To redirect your existing feed(s), you can use the .htaccess redirect mechanism. The
following fragment shows an example of a permanent redirect and a temporary redirect:
RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /news.rss http://feeds2.feedburner.com/NewsFeed
Redirect 302 /news2.rss http://feeds2.feedburner.com/NewsFeedTemp


FeedBurner is still one of the most popular services for content publishers
who want to measure their content syndication subscriber base. After Google
acquired FeedBurner, many publishers reported bugs, including a significant drop in
their subscribed user base. Google claims to have fixed these bugs in addition to providing
more accurate reporting analytics. FeedBurner continues to be a tool of choice
for many content publishers. If you wish to use FeedBurner for statistical or marketing
purposes, you can redirect your existing feeds to FeedBurner.

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Traditional Marketing

The value of using SEO is clear. Studies have shown that organic search results are more
highly trusted than PPC (SEM) advertising. SEO is about having the right knowledge,
applying proven techniques, experimenting with new ones, and letting the search engine
do the rest. Naturally, the prerequisite to all of that is to have engaging content
and a quality product (or service). Stay away from:
• Making changes to emulate the competition without knowing why the change was
made
• Applying every SEO rule in the book (overdoing it)
• Not trying different keywords, and instead stopping at only one or a few
• Making frequent SEO-related changes without realizing the effects of previous
changes
The SEO work for each website is different. What is similar, though, is the actual SEO
process. You still have to go through the same exercise, regardless of whether you are
working on a new site or an existing one.

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SEO monitoring phase

Once the major SEO work is done in the implementation phase, the focus will be on
website maintenance. The maintenance phase takes care of problems (minor and major)
found in the (re)assessment phase. In many ways, the maintenance phase is similar
to the implementation phase.


The assessment phase uses the output of the monitoring phase as well as a series of
checklists (on which to base the assessment). This phase is also referred to as the
checkpoint phase. SEO checkpoints can be defined on a monthly, quarterly,
semiannual, or yearly basis. At the very least, quarterly assessments are required.
The point of the assessment phase is to see what is and isn’t working according to the
SEO plan. The assessment phase can uncover many problems.

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Microblogging with Twitter

Microblogging with Twitter has its limitations. You can do only so much with a single
tweet. You have only 140 characters to describe what you are doing. Anytime you want
to share a long URL, you may run over the 140-character limit.
To create the most efficient tweets, make them even shorter than the 140-character
limit. This way, anyone wishing to retweet your tweets can do so more easily. This is
your way of ensuring that your tweets can propagate to their fullest potential.
To solve this character limitation problem, you can use URL shortening services. In
addition to Bit.ly and TinyURL, you can also use BudURL.

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Important crawlers?

Google:
Crawler Description
Googlebot Crawls web pages (it’s the most important of the bunch)
Googlebot-Mobile Crawls pages specifically designed for mobile devices
Googlebot-Image Crawls images for inclusion in image search results
Mediapartners-Google Crawls AdSense content
AdsBot-Google Crawls AdWords landing pages to measure their quality

Yahoo!:
Crawler Description
Slurp Crawls web pages
Yahoo-MMAudVid Crawls video files
Yahoo-MMCrawler Crawls images

Bing:
Crawler Description
MSNBot Crawls web pages
MSNBot-Media Crawls media files
MSNBot-News Crawls news feeds

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Web Directories?

Web directories are not search engines in the typical sense; they are collections of links
that have been organized by humans. The advantage of web directories over typical
search engines is that all the links are (usually) reviewed by human editors for quality,
relevance, and suitability before being posted online. Make no mistake: some web directories
are completely automated. You should avoid these types of directories.
The most famous web directory, Open Directory Project, boasts 4,576,062 URLs in its
listings at the time of this writing. Most web directories, including Dmoz.org, can also
be searched.
Not all web directories are free. Some require yearly or one-time listing fees. One such
directory is Yahoo!.

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JavaScript Dynamic Links and Menus

Many sites use JavaScript to create links to other website pages. Here is some example
code with different link types that you may want to avoid:

<HTML>
<head>
<title>Link Examples ~ Things to stay away from</title>
<script type="text/javascript">
function gotoLocationX(){
window.location.href='http://www.cnn.com';
}
function gotoLocationY(){
window.location.href='http://www.yahoo.com';
}
function gotoLocationZ(){
window.location.href='http://www.google.com';
}
</script>
</head>
<body>

Example 1:
<a href="#" onClick="javascript:window.location.href=
'http://www.cnn.com'">News on CNN</a>
<br><br>
Example 2:
<a href="#" onClick="javascript:gotoLocationY()">Yahoo Portal</a>
<br><br>
Example 3:
<form>
<input name="mybtn" value="Google Search Engine" type=button
onClick="window.location.href='http://www.google.com'">
</form>
<br><br>
</body>
</html>

When you open this code in your browser, you will see a screen similar to Figure 8-2.
This is not to say that you can never use dynamic links. You obviously can, but you
need to think about tweaking your code to help web spiders see what they need to see.

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Content-Sharing Sites

The big players in content sharing have made it relatively simple for anyone to leverage
their platforms in the creation of media-rich content.
YouTube
Three former employees of PayPal created YouTube in 2005. They sold YouTube to
Google in 2006. YouTube is by far the most visited video sharing site on the Internet.
In January 2009, YouTube enjoyed an audience of 100+ million people in the United
States alone (http://bit.ly/11Xxcu).
You can post a video on YouTube.com and then embed the same video on your website
by following a relatively painless process. You can simply insert the Embed code as
supplied by YouTube within your HTML page. You
can also download many custom YouTube widgets to do the same thing.
Uploading your videos to YouTube is also easy. Make sure you optimize your video
title, description, and associated tags. Also, specify in the privacy setting that you want
to make your video public.
Once you upload your video, you can share it by connecting your YouTube account
with Facebook, MySpace, and Google Reader. Take advantage of these opportunities
to spread your news.
You may also consider using YouTube’s video annotations and AudioSwap features.
Video annotations allow you to add pop-up speech bubbles, pop-up boxed notes, textual
spotlights that are shown when the mouse moves over a predefined video area, and
video pauses. The AudioSwap feature lets you add background music to spice up your
videos.

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Search Engine Indexing

Google and others are indexing more pages than ever. Many of the modern search
engines now boast upward of a few billion indexed documents. Here is how Wikipedia
describes the process of search engine indexing:
Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate
information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics,
cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics and computer science. An
alternate name for the process in the context of search engines designed to find web pages
on the Internet is Web indexing.
Although web spiders do their best to obtain as many documents as possible for search
engines to index, not all documents get indexed. Search engine indexing is closely tied
to the associated search engine algorithms. The search engine indexing formula is a
highly secretive and intriguing concept to most SEO  enthusiasts.
Search engine indexing is not an entirely automated process.

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