Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’

Google announced a few months ago that Webpage load speed now has a small bearing on ranking in relation to SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) i.e. it is better to have faster loading Pages. There was quite a vocal reaction to this news by various Webmasters and Web designers.  Google, Bing and Yahoo have always maintained that the best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) activities are those that enhance the Site for visitors. The speed at which a Webpage loads is vitally important to Web-surfers. People don’t like to wait for Pages to load and are likely to visit an alternate and faster Site when experiencing slow Page load speeds.

As noted previously, and blogged by Matt Cutts, the influence on SERPs of speed is very small. The move to highlight the need to reduce page load speeds wherever possible should be welcomed by the average Web surfer who wants a better Online experience. Designers and Webmasters too should not fear the minuscule focus on speed as if they are good in their roles they will already be ensuring that image sizes aren’t unnecessarily large, video is compresses,  caching is enabled where appropriate etc. Minor Website amendments can result in significant speed gains so it is worth spending time consulting with tools such as Yahoo YSlow and Google Page Speed

Page load speed has been part of Google’s competitive advantage since its inception. Web page load speed can also be a competitive advantage for your Site.

Incoming search terms for this article:

• page speed site:eckstein id au

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Load speed of WebPages is increasingly becoming important, not only for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but also because people are becoming ever more intolerant of slow Websites. As Internet network speeds have increased (ADSL, 3G, WiMax etc.) so content of Websites has increased therefore negating some of the benefits of faster networking.

The obvious question that many people on my SEO and Web related courses ask is how to improve Website Speed. There are two factors here; Website speed and Webpage speed. Both are interrelated but probably best described separately (recommendations include on-page and off-page factors and range between non-technical to fairly technical):

1. Improve Website Speed

Website performance includes factors that will influence the entire site and every affected Webpage. The obvious candidates for improvement are hosting your Website with a high availability provider, ensuring that your Website host has high-speed servers and so on. Some other factors to consider are:

1.1. Host in the same country as your primary target audience

Having your Website hosted close to your target audience can realize big benefits in Website speed. Website I have targeting the U.S.A. are hosted in the U.S. whereas this Website is hosted in Australia due to my primary audience being located in Australia. There are various good cloud hosts such as Amazon EC2 which simultaneously host and deliver from multiple geographic regions. Although often more costly, for busy Websites with multiple targeted countries Cloud hosting is likely beneficial.

1.2. Use Expires header.

Expires header instructs compatible browsers to store the file and use that local file for reuse instead of downloading the file from the Website. An expiry date and time is added according to settings in the .htaccess file and the file is only downloaded again if the expiry date and time has passed or if the browser is otherwise instructed to download all files again (e.g. ctrl + F5 in Firefox). Expires Header settings hugely benefit visitors that revisit your site.

Here is how to enable Expires Header for gif, png, jpg,jpeg, ico, css and javascript:

1. Copy the blue text below

# BEGIN Expires header

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault A0

ExpiresByType image/jpg A1209600

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A1209600

ExpiresByType image/ico A1209600

ExpiresByType image/gif A1209600

ExpiresByType image/png A1209600

ExpiresByType text/css A1209600

ExpiresByType text/javascript A1209600

# END Expires header

2. Open the .htaccess file of your Website which will be in the same folder as index.php or index.htm or similar (open .htaccess with notepad, notepad++ or similar).

3. Paste the copied text into .htaccess at the next line after text already in .htaccess and save changes.

The A1209600 text as entered into .htaccess determines the time for the files to be stored by the browser. 1209600 is calculated as 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 14 days. If you don’t amend affected files often then I recommend increasing the time to, say, 31 days (of course, renaming files on your Webpage/Website will make browsers download the file).

1.3. Use caching

Server-side caching benefits include the minimising of code execution. For example, on almost all websites that include multiple pages and/or anything beyond just plain text multiple files are referenced in compiling the final Webpage. This means that every time a request is made to view a webpage, multiple files are run to produce the output which all results in execution time. One way of eliminating the need for the running of all the files every time a page is viewed is to use caching. Caching stores the files and/or output in a very easily and quickly accessible ‘dynamic’ memory/storage for a period of time. Although caching may not provide significant performance enhancements for Pages accessed infrequently, for busier sites, caching provides considerable speed benefits.

The ‘WP Super Cache’ WordPress plugin is popular in order to enable Website caching.

1.4. Minify

As described on the main minify page; ‘[minify] combines multiple CSS or Javascript files, removes unnecessary whitespace and comments, and serves them with gzip encoding and optimal client-side cache Read the rest of this entry »

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Translating documents used to be an incredible inconvenience; say for example a document was sent to you in German then, in the past, one would invariably have to find someone who speaks German and English to do the translation.

With the advent of the Internet a few free Online translators became available however their translation was invariably flawed.

A few days ago I received an email in a foreign language which required translation (i.e. it wasn’t spam). I first went to Google Translate which mostly did a good job of translating to English however there were a few sentences which didn’t seem to translate all that well. I then went to Yahoo Babel Fish and was very pleasantly surprised with the translation results.

It is really impressive how much better the free Online translators are than a few years back. I highly recommend both Google translate and Yahoo Babel Fish.

As example of the translation capabilities of both the Online translators here is some French text from the French Embassy in Australia:

UBIFRANCE, l’Agence française pour le développement international des entreprises, est désormais dotée de son propre réseau de collaborateurs multiculturels dans le monde dédiés à l’accompagnement des entreprises et en particulier des PME sur les marchés étrangers. Les Missions économiques-UBIFRANCE sont aujourd’hui présentes dans 28 pays. Fin 2010, les Missions économiques-UBIFRANCE seront présentes dans 44 pays et formeront le réseau mondial d’UBIFRANCE.

La Mission économique – UBIFRANCE en Australie, partie intégrante de la mission diplomatique française, est chargée de l’accompagnement des entreprises françaises sur le marché australien.

Yahoo Babel Fish translates the above French text to the following:

UBIFRANCE, the French Agency for the international expansion of the companies, from now on are equipped with its own network of multicultural collaborators in the world dedicated to the accompaniment of the companies and in particular of SME on the overseas markets. The economic-UBIFRANCE Missions are present today in 28 countries. At the end of 2010, the economic-UBIFRANCE Missions will be present in 44 countries and will form the world network of UBIFRANCE. The Economic mission – UBIFRANCE in Australia, integral part of the French diplomatic mission, is in charge of the accompaniment of the French companies on the Australian market.

Google Translate returns the following English text as a translation of the French:

UBIFRANCE, the French Agency for international business development, now has its own network of collaborators in the multicultural world dedicated to supporting businesses and especially SMEs in foreign markets. The Missions-UBIFRANCE are now present in 28 countries. Late 2010, the Missions-UBIFRANCE will be present in 44 countries and form the global network of UBIFRANCE.
Economic Mission – UBIFRANCE Australia, part of the French diplomatic mission is responsible for the support of French companies on the Australian market.

As can be seen, the translation isn’t perfect however it is certainly far better than a few years ago!

Incoming search terms for this article:

• GOOGLE FISH

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The reason that the vast majority of people use Google as their preferred Search Engine over others (e.g. Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Clusty, Wolfram Alpha etc.) is because Google does search best. Google has such huge Search Engine market share because it returns more relevant results to searchers and is constantly improving. Google does well because it listens to end-users then provides what the end-users want.

It is therefore extremely disappointing that Microsoft is (apparently) paying News Corp. to exclude its content from the Google Search Results. News Corp. media is reporting that ‘News Corp, Microsoft want to lock Google out’. This is very negative for consumers because Microsoft is not trying to compete with Google through providing a better product but is rather trying to attract users to Bing (Microsoft’s Search Engine) through manipulating where data appears. This effectively means that Microsoft is trying to force competitors to provide an inferior product instead of itself providing a better product i.e. it is trying to lower the standard for everyone.

Microsoft must be very concerned about Google at present. Microsoft’s major revenue and profit earners are the Office suite and the Windows Operating System. Google is gaining market share rapidly with Google Docs and Gmail (Google is taking market share from Microsoft Office including Outlook and Exchange) and the yet to be released Google Chrome OS is set to be a very big headache for Microsoft.

It is just so disappointing if, as reported by News Corp., Microsoft is engaging such negative competitive practices. Microsoft is sure to alienate many loyal followers through such negativity. Perhaps Microsoft should rather focus on the end-user rather than competitors. Google is doing very well by concentrating on end-users wants and needs.

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The problems with Google Feedburner and the mighty Yahoo Pipes is causing many of us headaches. For over two weeks now Feedburner has not been reading RSS data from Pipes. Many people use Feedburner to parse their Pipes RSS feeds and often publish this information on websites. Since the 6th of November Pipes and Feedburner have not ‘talked’ to each other which is proving big problem for Webmasters trying to publish information from Pipes through Feedburner (if you are one of the many who use this techniques for publishing on your WordPress website through the WP-O-Matic plugin you’ll be experiencing this problem).

Take a look at the official Yahoo forum for this Feedburner/Pipes Problem.  Apparently Feedburner changed a whole lot of IP addresses which is causing this issue …

Update: 21 Nov. ’09: Pipes and Feedburner are friends again (they are working together again) – Yipee!

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