zevWorks

Last Friday, Google announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results:

“As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...]

We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Speed

Will your website rankings drop?
Google’s Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:

“Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don’t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that ‘We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.’

The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.”

While 1% does not sound much, it can be a problem if your website belongs to the pages whose rankings will drop. At this time, Google’s new site speed signal only applies to visitors searching in English on Google.com.

How to keep your web pages listed in Google search results
There are several things that you can do to improve the speed of your web pages:

1. Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A “cheap” web host could cause problems.
2. Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
3. Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
4. Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
5. If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
6. Use as few images as possible on your website and compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.
7. Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages (in Footer, may be)

The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will be able to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient people. The average web surfer wants immediate results.

Page speed is not Google’s most important ranking signal. The end of Google’s page speed announcement contains a very important sentence: “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.”

It is important to optimize the speed of your web pages but it’s also important to optimize all other elements of your web pages if you want to be listed on Google’s first result page.

This is a guest post by Brandon Smith
Founder, BlogBuzzer

You have just setup your blog and have put a whole lot of time in effort into the content. Next step is to get visitors to your blog, how do you accomplish this? By sending your blog to the search engines and blog directories, BlogBuzzer allows blog authors to automatically submit their blogs to these sites.

BlogBuzzer allows authors to submit their blogs for free to over 60 different blog directories by simply entering the URL and name of their blog, as well as the language that the blog is targeted for. Once submitted the blog is then “pinged” to these sites and will be picked up by sites including Google Blogs, Bloggernetz and Feedburner among others.

Blog authors can submit up to 5 blogs per day and are encouraged to submit their blogs whenever a new post is made. By pinging a blog every time it is updated all articles will be included in the blog directories and are easier to be found by potential readers.

Blogs have proven to be a very powerful means of social media and getting them noticed has been a daunting task, with many rules applying to SEO. The easiest way have been to submit to directories on a regular basis.

There are other web services that ping blogs including Pingomatic and Pingoat, but BlogBuzzer differentiates itself in the ability to submit blogs to the top social media sites as well including: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Twitter.

Here are some tips for successful blog recognition have been provided by the authors of BlogBuzzer and have been proven to get more traffic to your blog:

1. Include social media bookmarking and widgets on your blog that allow readers to interact with your blog.
2. Affiliate with other bloggers to form a mutual relationship in cross postings.
3. Create unique targeted posts, do not copy others work
4. Stick to a subject area that you are familiar with
5. Update, Update, Update, try to make a new post at least every few days

In the previous lesson we looked at some ways to capture subscribers from the various pages of your website.

Today we’re going to look at some additional list building strategies to help you build your opt-in list quickly…

(Watch this video…)

Main points:

(See video for specifics)

Co-registration and Buying Leads (aka. co-reg leads)

See video for details. While it’s a legitimate way of doing business, I generally do NOT recommend it.

I do recommend small scale co-reg/exchanges (ie. One-on-one basis, or a site like TrafficLeadsAndSales).

I do not recommend buying leads, mainly due to potential spam complaints. You can NOT import purchased leads into AWeber… period.

Action step:

1) Start building your list.

In the next lesson we’re going to look at how to build a RELATIONSHIP with your list.

As always, you are welcome to post your questions and comments below

Have a great day!

In the previous lesson we looked at some advanced tactics to add some extra juice to your squeeze pages.

Today we’re going to look at how to capture subscribers from other pages of your website… including all your pages that are NOT squeeze pages

(Watch this video…)

Main points:

(See video for specifics)

Wordpress Comment Plugins

- Action Comments from Robert Plank

Action steps:

1) Identify some page(s) on your website that you would like to utilize to capture subscribers.

2) Implement a list-building strategy on those pages.

We’re not done talking about list-building yet, because I’ve got some more powerful strategies to reveal in the next lesson.

As always, you are welcome to post your questions and comments below

Have a great day!