Anyway below is a quick look why we should limit the number of link on ever website.

3 Reasons Why We Should Limit No of Link In a Web Page

1. There is penalty of having too many link

Ever heard of “link farm”? This is a web page that the content is no other than *just* link. (Maybe thousand of that “<a href…>” tag on the source code).
Why people want to build such web page? Well, there was a day that people sell and buy that kind of link to boost their rank on search engine, then the big search engine imposed penalty of such web page to be considered as spam – link spam that is. Also, since there is nothing else on the page, such page will be  hardly amusing to any human visitor.
So, if you ever see this kind of horrible page, it’s natural that you will think “no, I don’t want my website to be penalized by having too many link.”..

But just how many is too many? Obviously 1000 is too many. But how about 100? As we as public technically do not know what is the exact formula/rules any search engine has, we can only refer to “common sense”. Well I do think 100 is still too many. Imagine if you want to see all the link inside a web page – clicking 100 link will be awfully too difficult.

Too many link in tag clouds

2. Search Engine’s Spider / Bots has limit too

Consider that any search engine’s spider a.k.a bots are actually a computer program. And one of the thing that computer programmer make sure does not happen in a program is what so called “endless loop” – this is where the program keep repeting the command over and over again without conclusion exhausting resources (memory and/nor harddisk space, etc) – on day to day term we call it “hung up” or crash.

So in order to cater as many as possible web page on internet, I don’t think a web crawler a.k.a spider can be allowed to sit in just 1 page because that page has ten thousands of link. Therefore the programmer need to impose a limit, say 1000, 100 or 200 (again, nobody knows). If we have more link than that upper limit, then the  rest of the link will not be seen by the spider. But can we control which link that should be seen and which one important one… That’s almost impossible.

Therefore, what can we do?…Yes, just limit any link on our website to a number that considered “normal”.

3.  Save your “Link Juice”.

If you remember the basic of how a backlink can make a webpage higher in search engine rank, then having too many link (internal or external) will reduce those juice to be passed over to your link. For example: if you have a web page with PR3, you have only certain amount of link juice to be shared to any of your link – say you only have 10 links, then each probably get 3 drop of the juice – but if you have 30 link, probably each only get 1 drop of that imaginary link juice.

This is one of the reason why the attribute “nofollow” is being used – to prevent the link juice to get pass over. Perfect if the spider a.k.a bots obey this attribute – apparently many bots did not really fully respect the attribute (they still just go jump to that link regardless of the attribute)

So, again – the easiest to control this is just to limit the link itself at the first place.

Common Offender

Number one offender in my mind is those “tag clouds” especially from WordPress blog (see picture). You should limit your tag cloud (see picture) to maximum 20 or 30 item only. More than that will give headache to your human visitor and upset the robot visitor.

The second big offender would be those LHS (Left Hand Side) menu items on a e-commerce website that list 1001 category of product. The way to do it is to group and sub categorized them. Perhaps do it using javascript menu (that is not visible by the spider). Limit the overall menu to 20-30 items only.

I see this on most of the blogs: at the end or beginning of an article, usually there is a list of tags that want to be emphasized on that article. Although, it is crucial for the purpose of the reader (who want to know the key important content) and for the indexing, the tag does not necessary have to be linked to tag page. As long as the word is there, it will get indexed. But you do not need to put link on those tags list.

Also not really necessary to repeat of the same link over and over again. Yes, it may be considered that the higher positioned link will implied more important link than the lower one, but having the same link repeated over and over and over again is just annoying.

Conclusion

So in general, for the purpose of your article contents probably you will need 5 to 10 link (usually external). Another 10 or so for the infrastructure of the web page (Home link, contact us, about us, term and condition, subscribe feed, etc) – then if you must another 20-30 for those tag clouds, menu, or everything else. Luckily all javascript generated content (including Google’s adsense) is not visible and counted as active link. So, in total about 50 links are the maximum number of link that you need to aim.

Try to limit your link, regardless whether it’s internal or external – not only to prevent clutter on your page, but to optimized the SEO result that you expect. But even if you don’t care about SEO at all, having too many link in a web page is an eyesore anyway. Don’t do it. Keep it around 50 links or less!

TIPS: Install “Search Status” plugin/add-on on your Firefox – it has “Link Report” that give you the exact info about your link in that page.

Go start updating your theme files on your website…!
Take care !

The Gist of TITLE TAG

The purpose of this TITLE TAG has 2 folds:

1. To summarize the content of the page while attracting user to click the link.
2. To be the main item to be indexed by search engine.

To set your webpage title, you just need to put it between <title> and </title> on top of your page. Typically, the title tag should be your 4th line of the code, after DOCTYPE, HTML and HEAD. For example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<title>3 Keys SEO Principle: Absolute Must To Know | SEO By Me</title>

There are 3 prominent places where this title will be displayed as key label, in order of importance:

1. On the SERP (Search Engine Result Page): This is the most important aspect of SEO effort. You will want the search engine to index your page according to what you want.
   
   

   Search Engine Result Page

2. On Bookmarks (Online and Offline): I am not talking only about the bookmark for each browser (try press Ctrl-D to bookmark this page), but also the social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us, digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Mixx, Twitter, etc. When a user want to share or save on any of those site, by default, whatever you put between those title tag will be used as your main display/entry.
3. On the top of your browser windows and tab: This display is the least of our worry as it is being displayed on user’s browser after it is loaded. Well, the user already click and display the full page on his/her browser, so, the very purpose of this title tag has been accomplished.
   
   

   Title on Internet Browser

What’s Next

So, having known the above, some importants aspect below need to be considered seriously to achieve the maximum of your SEO effort:

1. The title tag need to be different for each web page as it has to represent the content.
   So, if you have static website (html), you need to edit each of the page and customized the title tag accordingly. If you have dynamic page, make sure the title page is generated dynamically as well – do not just put your website or blog name between the title tag.

   WordPress Tip: Do not muck around with the title tag, simply just put below line on your header.php or whereever your theme produce the header:

   <title><?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?></title>

   and then install All-In-One SEO pack to take care the rest. Even the default setting of this plugin will give you the most of title tag’s SEO.
   .

2. Incorporate keyword(s) in the title.
   Forget all the fancy title, it is important to incorporate whatever you want to emphasize and ranked high on the search engine. For example: if you have article about the latest gossip of Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie, do not just write the title tag as “Stop Press! They Did It Again !” which is does not mean much. But try like “Brad Pitt Makes Angeline Jolie Mad: Yesterday News?” which incorporate 3 important phrase “Brad Pitt”, Angelina Jolie” and “News” – Yes, you can write anything at all on the actual title on the article, but pay a little bit more attention for the Title Tag.
   .
3. It’s Premium Space: Make it Short and Prioritize.
   Remember, Google (and others too) will only display the first 65 characters on the SERP. So, incorporate some keywords, but do not stuff it with too much keywords that make the title very lengthy. 65 characters should be enough. Just prioritize.
   Anything above 65 characters will be truncated and an ellipsis (“…“) is being displayed instead on Google’s.
   .
4. Incorporate your brand,  if possible.
   On the example above, I put “| SEObyme” at the end of the title tag. This is call branding. Imagine if you see the SERP above, just a glance you will know which article is from your website. But remember that keywords has more priority than branding. So put your brand at the end of the title, so if you need to have extra keyword and the titles goes beyond 65 characters
   .
5. Support the title tag with headline
   Your title tag does not have to be exactly the same with your headline (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>…), but maintain at least partial aspect of the title tag into the headlines. Not only for the search engine to confirm the content consistency/relevancy, but also to manage your reader expectation when they click your title tag.
   .
6. Use normal capitalization.
   Do not use all capitals letter on the title tag. This will alert the search engine robot that your site might be a SPAM site as that what Spam website usually do (using all capital letters, or all lower case letter). Not only that, it will become an eyesore for your user as more and more people is now aware that capital letter is a SCREAMING method. If people scream at you, will you visit them ? Not likely…
   .

OK, now… check and fix all of your title tag !

Google indicates that the speed of your site will be considered as part of the page rank formulation. Website with speedy display will have additional point used for calculate it’s rank.

As usual, there is no exact formula, there is no definite date as when it’s going to be implemented and people is wondering around. But Google gives more definitive clue. As Yahoo has its YSlow extension, Google is now also incorporating similar tools on its webmaster tools complete with massive documentation as an instruction to everybody how to do it right. Explain below is the method to benchmark the performance of your website using mainly Google’s Page Speed tools and Pingdom performance tools. It’s quite simple and will not cost you money to do it. Let’s get started.

Resources

There are 4 main resources that need to be handy on your computer to start optimizing the speed of your website.

1. Account on Google’s Webmaster Tools (Free to signup if you haven’t has one: every serious webmaster need to have one!)
2. Google’s Page Speed extension on Firefox.
   Use your Firefox, login to you Google’s Webmaster Tools, click on your site, and on the left hand Dashboard menu, click the “Site Performance” as picture. Then click the below button.
   
   Page Speed requires “Firebug” to work. If you haven’t installed this just get it here.
3. Online Pingdom Tools , http://tools.pingdom.com/ – Alternatively, you can use “WebPageTest.Org” on http://www.webpagetest.org/. It’s more comprehensive but could be overwhelming and confusing if you are not up to it. Pingdom is good enough – you just want to compare the result before and after optimization unless you want to go deep in this stuffs.
4. Page Speed documentation as your knowledge base in doing the optimization

Method Optimizing Your Website

1. Go to Pingdom Tools : http://tools.pingdom.com/, enter the URL of the homepage of your website and run the test.
2. After test finish, note the total time required to load your website in the “Website Information” on the left bottom corner of the screen
   In this example, it took 9.7 seconds to load 41 object of 585.2KB
3. Now open Firebug (the default: press F12 key), click Page Speed and make sure “Profile Deferrable JavaScript” is active
   (click the arrow and tick the option)
4. Clear the cache of your browser and restart the browser
5. Go to your website but do not login into your website as it may behave differently (sent additional info in cookies, etc). If you are logged in, just logout.
6. Activate / open the firebug again (press f12) and click Page Speed
7. Refresh the display of your website by clicking Refresh button while holding the shift key (to not using cache)
8. Click “Analyze Performance” button on firebug
   
9. The result then will be displayed on screen, something like pictured on the right. In general there will be 3 different marking the green tick, the yellow triangle and red exclamation. Well, start fixing the problem from the reds then yellows. And basically don’t worry about items that already green.
10. Try to work the item one by one with patience. Don’t expect to be able to fix everything within few minutes. Take a good half day or full day to do this optimization. If you are not the technical person, have your technical person be with you when you do this. Otherwise with a bit effort you will find that doing this optimization is a little bit fun.
11. Repeat task (1) to compare the result

This method and tools are the one wake me up that you can really do something to speed up the website. On this actual sample website. I manage to make change the access from 9.7s to only 1.8s or roughly 5x faster.

Waterfall Chart to visualize the loading of all your file

Because of the good result, I actually now can add some functionality on the website to make it even better. If you’re curious, the real website that I did above was http://cookingbyme.com – a start-up cooking niche wordpress blog. After adding the FCG as you can see, the access is still pretty fast (under 4s). No the website is on managed VPS, not dedicated server.

Doing further comparison, it seems that although located on the same server, different website with difference theme and functionality, give me a really different result.

I would suggest to make all your website accessible and displayed around 5 second. The faster the better. Not only it will give you bonus point for the pagerank, but also make your visitor happy and in awe – stand up from the crowd: not only the content and functionality, but the speed as well.

What I really did will be written on several other article on this website as well. Stay tune !