The speed of a website is important to not only site owners, but to everyone online. Google’s done some research and found that users that come across slow sites spend less time at the site, and vice versa. Not only that, according to recent data it also reduces operating costs.

Here are a few tools provided by Google to test the speed of your website:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Less than 1% of search queries are affected by site speed, and the new signal only applies for visitors searching in English in Google.com – for now.

It’s official: The speed of your site affects your rankings is a post from: Tamar

Long awaited Site Verification Sharing
I couldn’t be happier to hear that Google added a long waited feature to their Webmaster Tools Site Verification process. Previously if more than one person needed to be a verified owner each person had to go through the drama of the meta tag or html tag verification process.  Now you don’t have to endure the same grueling verification process but more users can be added by existing verified site owners.

Make sure you read these  important notes before you go ahead and use the updated site verification feature.

Say no to hacking and site abuse
Google is taking a further step in the fight against hackers and spammers. Last year November Google announced that they would add notifications about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help site owners to better protect their websites.

The latest roll-outs of these notifications provides alerts about suspicious acitivy or potential hacking as well as steps on how to get the site fixed and back into Google’s SERPs.

Starting this month the notifications sent to the Message Center could include:
- Spammy or abused user-generated content
- Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
- Suspected hacking acitivities.

Who doesn’t love Google Webmaster Tools?

Google webmaster tools loves site managers is a post from: Tamar

If you are using both Google Analytics and FeedBurner, the default setting would have already been applied to your accounts.  You do however have the option to tweak these to your needs if you wish.

Read the whole article straight from the Google Analytics blog and notice the longer url in the address bar when the page opens.  It’s a great example of Tip#1 actually implemented by Google in their Analytics blog’s feeds.

Not sure what a feed is?  Read up on what an RSS feed is, and how it works. Most blogs also provide an RSS feed to their subscribers.

Tip #2 – Track changes on sites without a feed with Google Reader

Have you ever felt the need to track changes to a site with interest to you? Whether you’re awaiting some sort of announcement on a specific page or as an SEO want to know when some changes have been made to your competitor’s product page, you can now track these in one place without feeling like some kind of ‘Website stalker’.

Simply go to Google Reader and ‘create a feed’ with the url of your page of interest.  If there is no feed on this page, Google will label it as a ‘Google-created feed’. See example below of when I created a feed to tell me when Google’s Webmaster guidelines has been updated.

Technically it can’t track every single web page out there and as a Webmaster you can opt out of this to stop the Googlebot from indexing it via your robots.txt file.

Tip #3 – Google Analytics Annotations launched

After slowly rolling out this new feature in December, Google announced a few days ago that Annotations should now be available in all accounts.
Simply go to the graph you want to make a note in and click on the date.  An option to create a note will appear as seen in this screenshot.

What I find especially great about this feature is that you can choose whether you want to keep this annotation private (for your account only) or whether you want to share this with all user accounts that have access to that site’s Analytics.  A great way to give more insight to the Analytics team leading to more integrated reporting (especially if you are outsourcing your Analytics reporting).

Read the official announcement for more info with a video about Google Analytics Annotations.

Three tips to make your life easier – thanks to Google is a post from: Tamar

Three years ago we set as one of our corporate goals that we would like to be recognised for our client work by winning the Agency of the Year accolade. I’ll be honest, at times it has seemed an unachievable goal - digital agencies still don’t enjoy the profile of above-the-line agencies in UK client companies and search can be seen as even more specialist and obscure. But we kept going. As I said to the team this morning it just goes to show the immense power of writing down a goal and going for it.

I’m particularly pleased with this award for three reasons:

Firstly, it’s really satisfying that FSF members specifically (effectively client companies), have voted us Agency of the Year, rather than other agencies. It’s our clients we’re always working so hard to achieve results for and it’s them we particularly want to impress, not necessarily our peers (though that’s always nice so please keep the congratulations coming ).

Secondly, I’m delighted that we’ve won the award this year because we’ve achieved our fantastic results in a severe economic downturn in the UK – one of the worst years for the financial services industry on record. In any other year they’d be great results, in this year they’re outstanding. The market is incredibly tough for all agencies in the UK at the moment but no other search-led agency can rival us for the quality of clients we have and the outstanding long-term results we achieve for them.

Lastly, as far as we can recall this is the first time a UK search agency has been awarded an ‘Agency of the Year’ accolade in an category that includes other full-service and off-line agencies, rather than a digital or search specific category. This is great news for the profile of the digital industry and a defining moment for the whole search industry. It’s about time we came out from under our covers and shouted about what great results search can achieve for clients and what incredible ROI search can deliver.

I couldn’t be prouder of the really talented team I have here at Tamar. They’ve worked long hours and put in a lot of hard work to achieve our fantastic results for clients and this is a very satisfying reward for them. They’re also great company at an awards evening, I wish I could tell you what they got up to last night……

Tamar is Agency of the Year – a 1st for a UK Search agency is a post from: Tamar

You get what you pay for

So what will the new premium service include? People have been speculating this throughout most of this year, ever since the news began to seep out that premium accounts were being discussed. The general consensus seems to be that some/all of the following would be included in the premium-account package:

• Better direct-messaging functionality to allow brands to send coupons/offers to relevant followers
• Guaranteed site up-time – no more Fail Whale for brands…!
• Advanced statistics and analytics about your activities
• A “verified account” status for brands, similar to that which is currently offered to celebrities – and presumably giving brands greater powers to remove impersonators / fake accounts

As well as the premium account, Twitter COO Dick Costolo confirmed this week that Twitter would soon begin to share revenues with it’s “partners” – presumably meaning sites like CoTweet and TweetDeck who add advertising to their Twitter-API-powered applications?

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” – Arthur Conan Doyle

As a marketeer who has been grappling recently with the many obstacles to tracking bit.ly traffic through Google Analytics, I’m very keen on the analytics potential of the new premium accounts. More data about the effectiveness of ones tweets would be an excellent tool in a brand’s online arsenal, and would potential increase the already impressive potential of Twitter as a brand-building tool.

What would you like to see included in the new and much-discussed premium accounts?

Twitter launching commercial accounts – but with what? is a post from: Tamar

An Australian software company based in Sydney have the solution and have been providing Campaign Monitor to clients such as Facebook, Twitter and Ebay for 10 years.

We have recently started using Campaign Monitor to track all our email newsletters and it is proving a valuable insight for the analytics team. We can refine our send-out list by excluding addresses that have bounced and also see which links are most popular. This all helps as the stats we get are more accurate, and it keeps the boffins happy.

If your email design is looking tired or you are feeling uninspired the website also offers lots of resources and creative inspiration. You can download free design templates and refer to best practice design guidelines and they even offer a “getting started checklist” for clients who have just signed up and are complete novices.

The best thing about using Campaign Monitor is that it’s extremely easy to set up a campaign and get something sent out. The whole process is very intuitive and doesn’t make you think! Our record is about 30mins from creation to send out………this time also included testing! It will be interesting to see how Freshview improve on what is already a great tool.

Email Marketing – Campaign Monitor is a post from: Tamar

The morning kicked off with ‘advanced analytics’ by Will Critchlow ,who offered a host of advice on plugins to make the most of your Google Analytics package and what metrics to use to ensure the data is working for your campaign. Examples inc pages receiving organic traffic, unique unbranded keywords, time on site increasing, time parameters to measure satisfied readers who should not be included in bounce rate and more.

Next up was ‘Getting SEO done against the organisational odds’ with Richard Baxter, who was on a mission to get the attendees to become excel ninjas. With a simple introduction to excel’s tables and pivot tables to increase efficiency of keyword research, Richard had many hints and tips to manage an seo team and campaign to maximise visability, conversion rate, revenue and overall traffic from your organic search campaign.

After a quick break we moved straight into ‘ROI from social media’ with Lucy Langdon. The biggest learning taken from Lucy’s presentation was determining what ‘R’ stands for in ROI for any campaign. Whether it is conversion based or branding based, Lucy drove home to the group that it must be measurable to determine the success of the campaign. Key hints that she had experienced having good success in a social media campaign included data visualisation, useful resources, big images and lots and lots of lists.

Still going strong we swiftly moved onto ‘Diagnosing and fixing penalties, understanding guidelines’ with Jane Copland. Jane argued that many penalties are in fact not penalties at all. In fact the most common reason for movement in rankings are due to your competitors being rewarded for doing something well which you and your site aren’t. The biggest culprit is over optimisation of external link anchor text where brands and domain names aren’t included which stresses the need to manage your link campaign well.

Next up we had ‘Scalable site architecture’ with Duncan Morris who ran us through instinctive foraging methods as well as various methods to promote good site structure. Key learnings include having relatively few nodes per category, a balanced tree structure and a very obvious customer navigation path.

After a quick bite for lunch and a chance to mix with the other attendees we were back to work with the fascinating ‘Ranking models’ days gathered by Ben Hendrickson and the SEOmoz team. After monitoring 10,000+ SERPs, Ben looked at the correlation of ranking positions with everything from offsite links to title keyword matches. Most contraversial statement of the day – body and out anchors including keywords are more influential than including the keyword in header tags. Interesting.

Next up was a live linkbuilding exercise with Rand Fishkin and Tom Critchlow who came up with a number of intreating ideas of how to naturally expand your linkbuilding activity through link bait and establishing relationships with authority sites.

The final session of day one came from Ben Jesson and his Conversion squirrel to discuss ‘Conversion rate optimisation’. Ben explained how close onsite and offsite conversion can work together by sharing the learnings. In order to improve conversion it is essential to determine the objection of non-converting customers and address these objections. This can be determined through various conversations from face to face to refer a friend conversations to Twitter responses. Once the counter objection has been determined, split test and monitor the change in conversation. Ben also went on to show examples of how highly converting landing pages are being used in offsite print advertising, closing the offsite-onsite cycle.

SEO Pro Training – Day One Summary is a post from: Tamar