In the last article, we looked at why you would want to use a blog on your web site. We mentioned that people can either use a blog as their web site, or simply add it in addition to their web site. We even used GM’s Fastlane blog as an example of a corporate blog that you may not expect. Obviously GM, a manufacture of cars, is not the technology work horse you would expect when you think of other companies which might blog (like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others).

Obviously, the amount of time you can provide to your site/blog will depend your time, your team (if more than one will be posting), and the importance you place upon your blog.

 Blog Examples

Recently Mack Collier wrote for Search Engine Guide about some good examples of company blogs. Some are from companies which you would expect as well.

• Kodak - 1,000 words – provides photo tips, sample photos from various people, as well as how to use their products.
• Fiskateers – provides information about scrap booking. With several author’s they often post daily or more often, and include contest even.
• Others include Dell’s Direct2Dell, LinkedIn’s blog, and Innocent Drink’s Daily Thoughts.

 Integrating your Blog

Once you have decided to add a blog into your web site, you have to figure out how to integrate it into your web site.

Consider your existing design. You should pick a platform that will allow you to modify it’s design to fit into your existing site.  I’ve seen too many people use something like Blogger.com, which allows only minimal configuration, so you cannot incorporate it into an existing site design.  Creating a link to the blog, does not constitute incorporation.

The easiest way  is to incorporate a WordPress blog on your site.  If you cannot customize it, then hire someone who can.
Add Blog information to your existing site. Not only should there be a link to the blog (of course), but adding RSS feeds (more on those in an upcoming article scheduled within the next 5 days) to the existing pages.  If you cannot add it on your hosts, you need to seriously consider moving to a different host.

This can be done even if the site doesn’t follow modern web conventions.  A few weeks ago I had to integrate a WordPress blog into a site which we developed using tables and images.  While it made integrating the information into the site more difficult, it was put in, and if you don’t know to notice the blog specific pages, you  cannot tell.  I’m currently waiting for the site owner to publicly release the site before I showcase it here.

Should your blog replace your site? This is always an interesting question. WordPress, for example, allows you to have pages which are different than posts.  Because they can be processed independently, instead of in a chronological order as posts as, you can move your entire site to be driven from your blog. This obviously makes integration easier, but you have to talk to someone who can check your site for custom code to see how likely it is to be able to be moved.

I’m currently doing this with a site which you should see finished in a few weeks.  The entire site, standard pages and all will be done within WordPress, and it has made several parts much easier to integrate into the system than if it had been split between normal web pages and blog pages.

Popularity: 21% [?]

I’ve written about optimizing your site before, but it was in regards on how to optimize your site based upon your usage.

Now there are other reasons to optimize your site, especially if you use Google’s Ad Words to advertise your business.

A little history

Google Ad Words was one of the first ways which small business owners could advertise on the web. It allowed you to create small ads based upon keywords which people typed into Google. Users could bid on key words to modify the placement of their ad.

If someone typed in a key word you requested, and you bid high enough, your ad was seen.

Enter the Quality Score

Unfortunately, many times the ads shown had only a little to do with the key word entered by the user. So Google added a quality score. The quality score, in combination with your bid, would drive the ads position.

The quality score looks at a variety of factors, such as:

• landing page (the page which the ad leads to) optimized (or about) the key words that were bid on,
• how often is the ad clicked (called the Click Through Rate),
• does the page convert visitors into buyers (this is a minor factor only checked if few clicks are produced)
• and other things.

Just like Google doesn’t tell us everything that goes into their Search Engine rankings, they don’t tell us everything that goes into setting their quality score, but the do sometimes give us some hints.

Page Optimization

The latest hint they gave us deals with page optimization. (learn more here at SEO Round Table) Interestingly, a poor load time for your page will negatively effect your quality score, but a good load time will not improve it.

Google recommends:

• Use fewer redirects.
• Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
• Do not use interstitial pages.
• Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.
• Contact your webmaster or web hosting provider to discuss other ways of improving your web site’s load time.

So if noticed a recent drop in your visitors due to lower ad word placement, you might want to consider optimizing your site.

I personally see before too long, page load times affecting the regular ranking of pages as well.

Popularity: 18% [?]

In a recent article 7 Things I Love About Small Business SEO the author gives 7 things he likes about working with small businesses.

As someone who routinely works with small and new businesses, I have to agree.  Generally they can move faster than a large business, are more concerned with results, and are loyal if you perform for them.  This is part of the reason why I love working with small businesses myself.

However I would like to offer a few things small businesses must be careful about when working with someone who helps them with their web site, be it as a Search Engine Optimizer, Web Designer, or anyone else.

1. Do your homework when checking someone out – then trust them.  Often I find people want to second guess the person they hired.  I think this is often because many small business owners are used to working with just them.  Sometimes you have to let go.
2. Communicate your needs and any important dates.  I have some friends who did a website for a person.  A few days after finishing the site, the person went on a popular nationally syndicated radio show and announced his new site.  The server wasn’t ready for that level of influx, and problems ensued.
3. Understand your budget. As a small business owner, I understand the budget.  Most web local web developers are in the same situation. I know I can’t go out and drop thousands of dollars at the drop of the hat, and you probably can’t either. But at the same time, I know to be honest with what I ask and what I can afford.  Many times people want to buy a BMW on a Hyundai budget – and this just frustrates everyone.

If you can do this, then you can get the most out of your business and the work with your consultant.

Popularity: 16% [?]

It’s one thing to look at your reports, its another to start to draw conclusions from your data. Different people will look at the data in different ways. Most often, the reports are looked at by the marketing department/person to see how to better market the site, what Search Engine optimization needs to occur, and measure the effectiveness of their pay-per-click ads. All of these are important uses of the web analytics, but they are not the only uses.

I want to look at a specific example of how I, as a web developer, recently went about making a site faster based upon the results of some analytics reports.

The 80/20 rule of the web

We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule. On the web it would 80% of people only use 20% of your web site. In reality however, depending upon your site, it could be more like 90/10. A novice web developer will try to optimize all of the pages. An experienced web developer doesn’t bother with those pages that receive only the smallest amount of visitors.

On an Intranet web site I maintain, which tracks the employees’ internal education process, I was looking at the internal search feature. The search results are loaded into the same page. When you count the results from the searches, this page accounted for 24% of all of the page views, making it the second most visited page on the site. (The #1 page is mostly static text, so no real improvements could come from there.)

This means for every 2 people to visit the site, approximately 3 searches were performed in addition to the normal page load. So almost 1 out of every 4 page views was to this internal search engine, and some people were searching multiple times.

This became an area to consider improving. As a little improvement here, would have more effect than a large improvement on a page that is only viewed 1% or less of the time.

Too combat this, I decided to load the results in with AJAX instead of reloading the whole page. This process would improve search response in 3 ways.

Network Connections

Each time a file is downloaded over the Internet, the web browser checks to see if there is a newer version on the server, or if it can use a local file it has already downloaded (cached). Each time it checks to use a local version or downloads a new copy, the server is using up resources, and your end-user has to wait for the files to finish checking/downloading. Because the number of network connections has been reduced, other people can be accessing the site at a faster rate, and the end-user appears to be faster as they don’t have to have their computer do as much work.

The search page referenced 15 external files, plus itself. Of those 12 wouldn’t have to be called anymore. So I was able to reduce the number network connections by 80% for the search results. This was our biggest savings. The number of network connections on a web server is limited by both number and bandwidth speed, therefore the more connections, the slower each connection appears.

Processing of Files

Knowing in advance that it was going to be a popular page, I had tried to make the page as efficient as possible initially. However, with some of the features, like remembering the previous search criteria, because you never left the page, no longer needed, I was able to simplify the page.

The initial page load took about the same amount of time, however when the search results displayed, it appeared to be less than 1 hundredth of a second faster to process the file, about 4.45% faster. While individually it does not yield much savings, when applied as many times as it is with the popularity of the page, the savings adds up, especially during peak times.

Size of Results File Download

I knew I would save a lot in this area. The search interface, consisting of 6 controls, and a variety of other HTML sections, would no longer have to be duplicated in loading the results. This would mean faster downloads, and improved “perception” of the speed of the web page/server. Based on the same sample set of data, there was an 11K reduction in the overhead of the search results, or approximately 14% smaller download. This was for a search with over 100 results. However, many times fewer results (20-50) are returned. So the savings in bandwidth, while still approximately 11K, would be a much higher percentage (30-75%).

Final Thoughts

Because I could determine from our analytics package which files were being processed more, I was able to get the most bang for my buck. This update will take some load off the server, and allow all the pages to benefit from this enhancement. Likewise, almost every visitor will notice a performance improvement in the site because of how often this page is viewed.

This is how a web developer can effectively use web analytics to improve the performance of the web site.

Popularity: 23% [?]