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 !

The Basic: Quality over Quantity, But More is Better

WWW Popularity - photo:freephotosbank.com

The sole purpose of link building is to get as many as possible hyperlinks that point to your website. Period. Yes, quality over quantity rules, but you need to get as many as possible.

How to measure the quality of the link ? Actually there is no real formal standard on how to measure the quality of a link. But the de facto standard is using Google’s Page Rank (PR). Google will give each page (not the whole website) a score from 0 to 10. So PR0 is the lowest rank, PR10 is the highest rank. Since this method is the one that most publicly being used (due to lack of other popular method) then we just go along with it.

The problem with Google Page Rank is that the formula to determine the rank is highly guarded secret by Google. It’s Google’s trade secret, so no one really know exactly what it is. So beside Google itself, one only can make educated guess or analysis based on the existing case.

Convention: when we said website with PR6, then the web page that has PR6 is usually the home page (remember PR number is about single page, not the whole website)

So, back to the purpose, if you have 1000 links pointing back to your website (“backlink“) from PR0 website and your friend have only 100 backlinks to his website but all from PR5 website. Then I almost certain (remember, no one know exactly the exact proportion) that your friend’s website will have more popularity or widely spoken term “link juice”

How Do I Get a BackLink

There are a few numbers of way to get a backlink, but mainly it can be categorized as three mainstreams:

1. Get or Create It by yourself (or by your agent)
   Some of the activity are: submit website to directory, make a comment with your link on forum or other’s blog, bookmark your website/blog article in social media,etc. Of course you can do it yourself for free or hire somebody else to do it for you.With this method, you need to know where to put your link on. Some better than the other in term of relevancy and authority so the effect could very from website to website.
2. Exchange Link with Others
   While we think that Google only value very little on direct link exchange (website A point to B and website B point to A), but it is still better than without link. You can lessen the effect of direct exchange with 3 or 4 people where the link is going in circle (website A => B => C=> D) which make it not so obvious link exchange.

   This method, while practically free, you need to be able to connect with people at your industry or niche, work and negotiate with them and gone thru the deal.

3. Buy It From Others
   This method is the fastest and the easiest as long as you have money. If you can spend say $500 per year, it is achievable that you will get thousands thousands of backlink just like that in the blink of the eye.While officially Goggle is against people buying link, the fact is is out of their control and they don’t really strict about it (Otherwise all those website that sell link will be banned from the index, isn’t it ?) It is actually a business drive that make Google even more important and rule the internet so, they will in official forum against it but they will not do drastic action about it.

   For example: you can buy the link easily and permanently from textlinks.com (see Review about textlinks)

The Sad Facts

As you can see from above, the fastest way to give a boost to your website’s popularity will be by buying a link. So, if you really good marketer but somehow don’t want to buy links, you will be beaten by other people which is probably only half as good but willing to pay for the link.

Some sad facts:

• like it or not , you need to spend some money to buy link. Especially when you just starting out. Once the momentum is ongoing you can slowly reduce your link budget as the website become naturally more popular.
• but you still need to do (1) and (2) above. So end up, you still need to spend a lot of time doing exchange and manual submission, or spend even more money to hire someone to do it
• Even you have done 3 of them, you cannot really assure yourself that your website will get high PR as some other factor as the quality and content and the real visitor will still count as well, and as I mention no one really knows the exact formula.
• As more and more people know about the potential of internet marketing and the small capital required to start an internet business, then the more and more people to compete and fight for the popularity. This mean you will need even more and more link for your website.

This is a quite sad facts, but that’s life. So either you deal with it or give up. I would suggest just do it. But do it cleverly. Spend as little capital as possible to get the same result and you will be ahead.

Keep doing it, but do it cleverly !

TextLinks.com - Permanent backlink

Let us put our different hat and call ourselves “marketer” instead of just website owner.

First step as marketer, before we can market anything, we need to attract people to either type the website address by themselves or click a link that pointing to our website. After that, because of what we put on the website, hopefully we will be able to market whatever we want to market. We need to make people come to our website first.

Question:

How to get a lot of people come to our website ?

Answer:

I have to put my website on search engine !

WHY ? Of course, we can still do the traditional advertising like putting ads in magazine or distribute fliers to people. But the result will not as effective compared to if we take some effort to make sure our website is listed in the search engine result

WHY ? Because by using search engine, we only deal with motivated buyer.

Remember call from telemarketing company when we are about to have our dinner? They’re pretty annoying isn’t? Why? Because we wanted to have dinner, but the marketer offered us something else that we did not want. This is what we illustrate on the right, we wanted a square, but are offered a circle instead. No matter how good the circle is, it is less likely to be marketed successfully

Another example: imagine when we are just strolling in a big shopping center looking for book store or hardware shop. And suddenly, these restaurant marketers are calling out offering their good food. Well, their marketing effort will be less likely to become successful because of this square/circle problem.

Now, let’s compare: Imagine it was late in the afternoon and we are really hungry and we walk down the same shopping center above and many restaurant marketers are eagerly promoting their good food. Will they be likely more succesful this time ? Absolutely ! This is what we call motivated buyer. We have already wanted a square, and suddenly many colourful squares are on offer.

This is exactly what search engine does. When we type “Nikon digital camera” in the search engine. Do we want to buy or at least very interested in that digital camera? Of course! When the buyer is motivated already, is it more likely to market the product easier? You betcha !

So, in nutshell, people already wants “something“, and search engine will provide list of many “something” for them to choose !

Thus, for us as marketer, of course we want our website to be on that list. And preferably on top position

Introducing SEO or “Search Engine Optimization“… – this is how they called. How to make a website to be ‘optimized’ for certain keywords (that “something”) so that the website has a high position on the result. Big and small company call themselves “SEO Consultant” firm and charge up to hundreds of dollar per hour to have your site listed high in search engine. Yes, it is officially multi millions dollar business now.

This is for the shocking truth: for all of the money people spent on SEO, we probably wondering what is exactly they are doing.. Do they something extra ordinary to make it happened? Do they know someone inside the search engine company? Do they hack the server and cheat ? Do they know exactly what factor or formula to make a website ranked higher ? The answer is nothing of the above.

They don’t do something extra ordinary, they don’t bribe search engine employee, no – they don’t hack any server and no, they don’t even know exactly what make a website ranked higher than other website, they don’t know the exact algorithm. This information is a trade secret that is well kept by search engine company in order to compete with each other and maintain their domination. Also worth noting, the search engine company always improves and changes the algorithm from time to time. It’s not static

If they don’t know exactly the algorithm how they do it? Well, whatever they do, everybody can do it. Probably they will do it faster and more fluently (and more expensive). But once you learn the principles and implemented it (that’s all they do) you can do SEO by yourself (In this website, we say “I can do SEO by myself – it’s SEO by me!“)

KEY HIGHLIGHTS:

• As marketer we really want our website to be listed on search engine. As high as possible !
• Introducing SEO: Search Engine Optimization: how to make our website on top or very high on the search engine for specific keyword(s)
• The exact algorithm and system is not known by the public (including big or small SEO firm)
• “I can do the SEO by myself – It’s SEO by me!”