Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Google Website Clinic for Non-Profit Organization Websites

Hi Friends,

On 25th Oct 2010 Google search quality team announced a Website Clinic for non profit organization websites where website owner submit their website and Google webmaster team will offer broad advice that help to improve user experience.

Main goal behind this clinic is to help non-profit organizations but you can also submit your website for review if you are small business or government websites. Before submitting your website for reviewing your website by Google you must read their submission guidelines.

How to submit your website for review:

First you need to register for site clinic by filling up the form. After registering your website Google experts will review your website and will determine trends and share for best practices to improve your site quality and user experience. After reviewing your website Google experts will submit their suggestion in follow-up posts that comply with the standard webmaster guidelines. By submitting your website for review you must permit Google to use your website as reference in their follow-up site clinic posts.

Here are the guidelines you should go through before submitting your website:

1. Your site must be registered non-profit organization.
2. You must verify the ownership of websites by submitting in Google Webmaster Tools.
3. Go through the Google Webmaster Quality Guideline and try to follow guideline as much as possible.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Google Launched new SEO Startup Guide

Hi All,

Google officials announced on 28th Sep 2010 that they have launched a new SEO Start Guide. Google first SEO start up guide was published locally before 2 years and now they have launched a new version of start guide that covers more examples and glossary to understand different terms and factors that will help to optimize a website. Google SEO Start up guide is available in different 40 languages.

This start up guide includes all the important parameters like Meta tags, URL, content, sitemap, website navigation, anchor text, robots.txt, 301 redirects and much more. Also this start up guide gives you an idea about how to make your website user friendly and search engine friendly.

What's new on this start up guide?

1. Descriptive information on all aspects.
2. Image example to better understand the content
3. Term definition (Glossary) throughout the guide
4. How to optimize mobile website
5. Colorful text with snippet to for better understanding
6. Useful information about social media optimization

These are the important topics that covered in this latest version of Google SEO Startup Guide. If you are curious to what else includes in this latest SEO Startup guide then click on the below link to download PDF file:

Google SEO Startup Guide Download

I am sure this will definitely help you in your website optimization process.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Google Sitemap - Support different content type in a single XML sitemap

On 29th June 2010 Google announced additional features in their XML sitemap. Before it was not possible to add different content type in a single XML sitemap but now you can add different content types like video, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information in your Google XML sitemap.

Google XML sitemap is the best way to let Google know about different pages and content of website and site owners and webmaster use this powerful tool get index by Google. They were working since 2005 from the time when they make this feature available and later introduced specialize sitemap formats that helps webmaster to add video, images, code, mobile URL and geographic content. Finally on 29th June 2010 Google had successfully introduced a single sitemap that accommodate different content types in a single file.

Here are the examples of different sitemap structure that used to specify different content type in a single Google XML sitemap.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:title>Grilling tofu for summer</video:title>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>


Some old features will still remain same like you can include maximum 50,000 URL in a sitemap and sitemap site must not exceed 10 MB.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami,
SEO & Web Promotion Expert.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Tips on speed up your website

As we all now aware that Google consider site speed as a new ranking algorithm and we all need to start worry about how to increase page speed. There are around 200 factors that Google consider for ranking of any website in Google search and site speed is one of them. We all know about on page optimization, off page optimization, social book marking, forum submission, etc. These all parameters are consider for effective ranking in search engines but know start thinking about increase site speed.

Google and Mircosoft did lots of research about the page loading effect on user experience and final conclusion is people stay on the website that load quick. Here are few things that every webmaster and website owner should consider.

I highly recommend to download YSlow that will show your website overall score. This score will give you exact idea how much exercise you require for your website to load faster. Compare your competitor’s websites and check how much they score, if you score is lower than your competitor then you need to worry about your website performance.

Reduce page size - Remove all unwanted tag from HTML tags and space from your HTML code.

Don't use inline CSS - Instead of using inline CSS create a css file and call file on every page of your website that will also help in reducing download speed.

Progressive rendering web page - Progressive rendering is very helpful as browser shows whatever information they have and progressively wait for other data to load. To implement progressive rendering on your website put your style sheet at the top of the page so browser display step by step informative and load your website as soon as possible.

Fewer HTTP request - Reduce the number of HTTP request as this will help quick rendering of your web page. You can minimize HTTP request by combining files, combine css and combine scripts.

Include JavaScript at the bottom - Use javascript at the bottom of the page this will help to load your page quick. When browser download javascript it will stop downloading your website data, so any parallel downloading will stop when browse request Javascript downloading.

GZip Compression - This is very important as it will help to reduce the size of the web page and make website load quicker. If your website developed using PHP then you can put simple code at the top of the page for GZip Compression, here is the code



We have successfully implemented this on our website at WebHostingWish. Try to find any tool that will check Gzip Compression.

Increase Browser Cache - This is another important aspect that helps to reduce the web page rendering time. Increasing browser caching will help loading your web page faster, this work like this if someone visit your website browse cache all data of your website and for any subsequent visit you don’t need retrieve data again as its already stored in cache. You can write command in you .htaccess file for browser cache.

So, keep all above mentioned factors in mind that will definitely help to load your website quicker and eventually help to rank better in Google for your important phrases.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Site Speed - A New Algorithm in Google Search Ranking

This is was recently announced by Google that they have included site performance (site speed) in their search ranking algorithm. This means if user request a site and if give quick response and open quickly then its chance for getting in top position will be high compare to other competitors websites that take long time to load.

So, from now webmasters need to worry about the design, development, scripts, images, etc. Fast loading websites give better user experience and keep them happy. User stay more on quick loading site then slow websites. Google use variety of factors and sources to determine website speed compare to other websites and depends on that quick loading site get higher position compare to slow websites.

You can download Yahoo YSlow that help you in optimizing your website speed.

Webmasters get ready for this new change in ranking algorithm and start thinking about how to compress the web page size and improve loading time.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Multi Language Website - Tips and Tricks

Hi All,

Multi language website is important when your target audience located in different countries that speak different languages. For example if you have English website for English audience and also want to target French speakers then your need to create a different websites for different audience.

Here are tips about multilingual websites:

URL Structure:

Keep it easy and understandable, this help user to identify which language website they are reading. You can create a sub domain or create sub page to identify language. For example

http://www.mywebsite.com/en/index.html
http://en.mywebsite.com/index.html

If you want to target French speakers then use following URL structure

http://www.mywebsite.com/fr/index.html
http://fr.mywebsite.com/index.html

This helps users and search engines to know for which country this website translated for. If you want to make URL in non-English then use UTF-8 character encoding. Always use UTF-8 encoding if you are not sure which one is perfect for your website.

Tips for properly crawling and indexing multi language website

Google recommend not use automated translation tool for language translate. Most of the automated language translation software not work perfectly and if your website represent wrong information or if your user unable to understand what you have written then you might loss your business.

Cross link all your language pages, if someone viewing your product page in English put a direct link to other countries so search engines and user can easily find same detail in other languages. This make easy for users to navigate to your website.

Also Google not recommend automatic redirects as this prevent users to view your website in other language. If you have done automatic redirects, if English reader viewing your site from France then they probably unable to view English version of your site and you loss your potential visitors. Write different content for different language, don’t set cookies to redirect user to other language.

If you have any further question please post comment here and I will be happy to answer your questions.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.