SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Spot the difference

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Take a good look and tell me what you see (in an unusual stylistic move for me, you can click these images to see them full size):

The top image is a menu made up of images. Which means not only does loading the site require loading a bunch of extra jpg, png or gif files, but much more importantly search engines don’t know what they say. To make matters worse, this particular site didn’t even use alt tags*.

Plus if you do click on it to see the full version, you’ll notice the text isn’t even well formed, it’s pixelated and ugly.

The bottom image is the same menu, with a tiny one-pixel-wide image (well, actually two one-pixel-wide images) repeating. The text is just that, text. So search engines can scan it, and see what they say.

The implications of that is you can have your pages’ headings, which should sum up the content of your site pretty well, on every page. Those headings should be written to include your keywords, and you really want those on every page!

And thanks to modern font smoothing on mainstream operating systems, they look a lot nicer.

I cannot fathom why this menu was originally made entirely with graphics. Unless it was just for the roll-over effect, which did nothing but make the text turn orange.

Which it still does, thanks to some really simple CSS.

* Please note, alt tags are actually not tags at all, but attributes of the img (image) tag. I really should adjust and start using the right terminology, but when you’ve been at this for 17 years, well, old habits die hard.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Site speed

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Google are very up-front about their using page load time as a metric for ranking pages and sites. Other search engines aren’t quite as open about why they rank websites the way they do, but there’s an excellent chance they measure it as well.

There are a lot of ways you can reduce the time it takes your pages to load, and as much as I’d love to produce one, this is not an exhaustive list.

Just as I did with the previous entry in this series, I’ll rely on bullet points to help keep this post useful.

1. Images.
Unsurprisingly, the smaller the file size of your images, the faster they load. As a rule of thumb, any image which is made up of text, line-drawings, or icons is best saved as a PNG. Photos, and realistic images are best saved as JPG.

There are all sorts of other bits of information kept in image files to, called “meta” data. Striping that out can be a great way to save a few kilobytes.

Yahoo Smush.it is a great free tool to help you with this process. I also recommend the use of professional graphic software like Adobe Photoshop, which will show you how various quality settings for images will affect the file size and visual quality.

2. Optimise your code.
You’d be surprised how many comments, or unnecessary tags get left in live code, be it HTML, PHP, Javascript, CSS, just about anything. Or sometimes code is just written by someone who didn’t realise there was one function available to do what they wrote in seven. Have someone else take a look at your code to see if you’ve missed something. Using include files, and lots of CSS, is a good way to keep from having to repeat yourself too.

There are other things like sticking your Javascript at the bottom of your pages if you can, not loading CSS selectors you don’t use, etc.

3. Minify your code.
Minify tools simply take out all that unnecessary stuff, your comments, line breaks you simply don’t need, and do all they can to serve as little information to the visitor as possible.

4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
A CDN will store cached versions of your site at various data centres around the world. So when a visitor from New Zealand want to look at your site that’s located in the UK, it can get most of the files it needs from perhaps Australia, which appear to speed up your site.

There are lots of services to choose from, but for a start I recommend CloudFlare, not least because it’s free. Their guff claims it should half the load time of an average website. That’s a pretty big optimisation right there.

5. Cache
Caching is a key way to speed things up. If you can, use page caching on the server, and browser caching to make sure visitors hold on to local copies of your images, pdfs and other things that don’t change very often for as long as possible. I’ll be honest, making caching work for you is pretty technical, even WordPress plugins like W3 Total Cache aren’t for the feint-of-heart. Caching is really worth doing though, systems like Yahoo!’s yslow and Google’s pagespeed that are geared toward showing you ways to improve your site speed (and certainly in Google’s case, they use your pagespeed results when ranking your site) all have it in their “very important” recommendations. Most people will want professional help with this one though.

6. Power!
One of the easiest ways to speed up any site is to improve your server’s specifications. Adding more RAM, or more processing power nearly always shows a good improvement, and with modern day modular hosting many webhosts can up your specs for you for a few pounds a month. I added an extra 512MB of RAM to the server this site runs on, and it instantly loaded 145% faster. Easy.

There’s a lot else of course. Pre-loading content, different forms of caching, various web server add-ons etc., but if you start with the six listed above, you’ll be in good stead.

A word of caution: it’s all too easy to obsess over your site’s speed, because it’s a metric we can get results for really quickly, whereas regular SEO work can take weeks to affect your rankings. But keep your eye on the big picture, and remember, this is part of a larger goal, and absolutely nothing beats quality content in the SEO game.

Google Data Highlighter–you need to be using this right now!

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You know how Google pulls in interesting bits of information into its search results for some sites? Like showing right there in its results the dates and venues of a company’s upcoming events?

Well, that used to be done via little code tags in your HTML. Over the last few months, Google has rolled out a tool to let you do it across your entire site by previewing your live site graphically, and simply highlighting parts of it.

Those snippets in the results carry a lot of weight; people assume that the sites with snippets are for the more popular and professional businesses.

Make the most of this TODAY. (That’s right, I used CAPS. This is so simple and such a great upgrade to your Google presence!)

Guess who’s number 1 baby yeah!!11one!

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I’m more than a little happy about this.

I’ve beaten out the phone and Linkedin directories!

A Google UK search for “Peter Mahoney” returns my website as the top result.

Hitting number one is pretty phenomenal, especially when you consider that in the tech world there are a couple of CEO’s of major international companies sharing my name.

Plus this means when people ask me for my URL, I can show off my SEO skills by simply saying, “Google me”.

So what’s next? I want to see my Twitter feed at number two, that’s what.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Code

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There are a number of ways you want to improve your website’s code to help with SEO, and also to improve site speed which as I keep banging on about, is an important metric for Google.

This is probably the most technical of all the posts that make up my SEO primer, so by way of introduction, I’ll simply say the following are a variety of things within your site’s code that are helpful for optimisation. You may not be someone who ever touches your site’s code, but these are good things to know about so you can check your developer is doing their job right. 🙂

As much as I love spinning a good narrative, bullet points are going to be our friend in this piece.

  1. Meta tags.
    I’m getting these out of the way early, because they’re controversial. That’s because the way these are used is often misunderstood owing to historical changes. Basically, they used to be really important, and the first thing old-school search engines looked at. Then the spiders got more clever, and started to look to make sure your page’s text contained all the keywords you were using in the meta. Then they realised they could do away with the meta and just scan your text. For this reason, a lot of SEO (ahem) “experts” will tell you they’re not necessary. That’s bulls**t basically.
    This page     documents Google’s use of the “description” tag, which they do look at and use. Other search engines use them in varying ways too. The description and keyword (and author!) tags are all worth using, and using well. Make sure they tie-in with your copy.
  2. Alt tags.
    Search engines are certainly getting better at seeing what your site’s images are, but it’s far from perfect. Alt tags are the things that let the browser know what your image is representing, and therefore really important for SEO. I always make sure that my images contain tags that say not only what the image is of, but also the name of the page/entry it’s appearing in. That way the page name is repeated in the code too, which boosts it’s importance within the page.
  3. nofollow.
    About 10 years ago, people had things called doorway pages that were nothing but links to other pages in their sites. It was a dirty trick and got stamped all over by the search engine gods. However, you know how WordPress in particular creates pages for monthly archives, category archives, even tag archives? Well funnily enough they look a lot to spiders like doorway pages, containing tonnes of links (including all the sidebar links) to pages that just link to other pages en masse. I’ve measured this myself, and yes, you will get penalised for them. I have most of my links on this site set up with the nofollow rule, meaning the good search engines (technically spiders don’t have to respect this rule, but the big boys all do) will not follow it and count it as a link.
    I want them to see all my pages, but not to see them all a hundred times. I opt to leave category links being followed, but NOT monthly archives or tags.
  4. minify.
    This is just a trick to get all the unnecessary spaces and characters out of your code. It’s particularly useful for javascript and CSS, but your output HTML is worth shrinking too. There are tools out there that do it at load time, but that can place a burden on your server. I love this tool which takes all your CSS and merges parts where it can, and will (if you ask it to) minify the hell out of it.
    If you keep the page load time down, Google will rank you up.
  5. Javascript at the bottom.
    Place all the Javascript you can at the bottom of your page’s code. Again, it’s a speed thing.
  6. Make it clean.
    Don’t use tables unless it’s for, you know, a table. CSS has reigned supreme for a long time now. Don’t repeat attributes within tags. Check for redundant code. Consider taking out all those comments you put in while you were coding the site in the first place. Basically, give your code a nice, long bath.

Technically, your code underpins everything. Make it Search Engine Optimisation friendly and you’ll be much better ranked for it.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), a primer

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I’m starting a series on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to help explain a few key concepts, as well as helping guide you towards the right SEO expert. Ideally me of course, but whoever is telling you they’re an expert really should know how to cover more than the basics.

The number of people I see selling SEO services who really have no idea is appalling. (I’d say shocking, but there are a lot of opportunists out there!)

I’m going to break my series of SEO posts into the following sections:

  1. Code
  2. Site Speed
  3. Social integration
  4. Blogging
  5. Back-links and all other things link oriented

Naturally there is a lot of cross-over between them, but over the course of the series you’ll get a better idea of some key concepts, and some fairly original (but proven) ideas for their implementation.

All of course to get you more quality visitors!

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