The importance of website loading times

You always hear webmasters talking about how fast their site is and how they can speed it up even more. But why is that so important?
Why Speed Matters
If you've ever visited a website that takes forever to load, you know the answer to this. Visitors leave before you've even had a chance to convince them you have what they're looking for. Google has taken this one step further by including it in their list of ranking factors.

So, how fast a page loads does really sort of matter. Not that 1/100ths of a second will make that big of a deal, but if you can improve your load time and your code, there's no reason not to spend some time on it.

Tricks for Speeding Up Load Times

You can do tons of little things to speed up a page's load time:

Caching -- Plugins and tools such as WP Super Cache turn PHP into quick HTML, to ease the burden of heavy files and display pages faster. It's effortless and only takes a few seconds to set up.

CSS Sprites -- If you're a little more familiar with code, or have someone available to help tweak your code, you can consider using CSS sprites. Basically, this trick combines all of your graphics into one file and positions them correctly using CSS. You can find out more about CSS sprites on Spiced2.

JavaScript -- While pretty, JavaScript can eat a lot of resources and require a lot of time to load. By eliminating as much of it as you can, and minimizing the scripts on the page, you can quickly cut down load times. Also, because CSS can load at the same time as the rest of your site, move your JavaScript files after your CSS files. Rusty Brick also suggests delaying the loading of resources until after the visitor mouses over them. You can find out more at BetterExplained and JavaScript Guides Advanced.

Redirects -- While often necessary, redirects can really inflate page load times. Save yourself and the visitors the time by eliminating them where possible. As an added benefit, you'll also find you can deter people from linking to the wrong URL.

Images and Videos -- These things can eat up a lot of resources too. Get rid of any that aren't necessary (If your site is slow, a ton of ads in the sidebar is often the culprit). Then, compress and shrink them to the right size.

Analytics Programs -- While extremely helpful and useful, analytics can take a long time to load up. Save yourself some headaches by eliminating the code for any analytics programs you're not using. You also may want to switch to an asynchronous tracking code to speed things up.

Hardcode -- While all the gidgets, widgets, and doodads can be really nice, they can also require a fair bit of time to load. By hardcoding things like the header, footer, and sidebars, you can eliminate this time by causing it to load with the rest of your site.

Databases -- Just like trying to find something in a messy room, a messy database takes a lot of extra time to use. Clean it up, fix it, and optimize it regularly. You'll find plugins that do this, as well as an option to do this in phpMyAdmin.

Hosting -- If your host is slow, optimizing your website isn't going to help you any. And chances are if you went cheap on your hosting, it's slow. You may even consider setting up and using a proxy server to act as a go between your host server and your site visitors.


For a FREE SEO scan of you website, including speed test, contact Scream Media today on 021 559 0800 or sue@scream-media.co.za

Social Media and SEO

SEO experts have spent the last decade preaching a gospel of optimized page-level elements and inbound links. Those things are still important today,but getting real SEO results these days requires not only a technically optimized website and relevant inbound links but also a strong, vibrant Web presence that supports your overall brand. Which is where social media comes in.

Promote your content at sites like Facebook and Twitter. Search engines use shares and tweets as a factor when ranking content—so be sure to publish your most recent how-to articles and blog posts where readers can express their approval.
Interact with your fans and followers. You can't just dump content in social networks and expect it to go anywhere. If you don't have many engaged followers on these social media sites,there won't be anyone to help promote your content via shares and re-tweets.
He also suggests driving engagement with tactics like these:
Use keyword research to drive content development. The keywords that visitors use to find your site provide a good indication of the content they want to read. "Look for areas of high search volume, and develop content around those subjects,"
Use historical keyword data to exploit seasonal trends. For example a client's traffic spiked on the term "motorcycle safety" in May. After discovering May was Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month, we prepared content ahead of time so it would rank well during that period.

The Po!nt: Socialize to optimize. Social media matters to search engines—and that means it matters to you.

Improve your sales online with SEO

Search engine optimisation is something that a lot of small, medium and large businesses will already be familiar with. The idea behind the discipline is to tailor business marketing strategies to the online world and this is a positive move for a number of different reasons.

Clearly there must be some clear motivation for the worldwide increase in internet marketing. The simplest explanation for the rise is that businesses are working hard to keep in step with the attitudes and behaviour of their customers. The internet has become more and more of a domestic resource in the last few years and thanks to social media, email and internet search, the general public now has a plethora of reasons to get online.

Businesses that ignore these trends are likely to miss out on a huge amount of potential traffic. However, it is important to note that having an online presence is not all it takes in order to profit from public fondness for the internet.

Without an effective search engine optimisation strategy, businesses often find that they don’t get the results they expect from their websites. This is particularly the case for enterprises that are just starting out, but it is also relevant for established businesses, because other companies that are especially adept at SEO have every chance of getting ahead of the competition.

The clear business value of using an SEO company is they constantly keep a track on the trends and changes in the search market to help maximise ROI. An example of the scale of these changes known as the “the Google Dance” can be seen by Google announcing it plans to make around 500 tweaks to the algorithm that it uses to rank web sites in 2011. Some of these may be small with little affect but others can dramatically change your web sites rankings.

Contact us today on 021 5590800

It is possible to put a certain level of SEO into practice without professional help, but if you want to muscle in on the major players in your area, then it makes sense to involve SEO experts in your campaign. Professionals can lend their own expertise to your company website in order to snare more traffic and secure greater prominence on globally recognised search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!.
Obtaining a higher ranking from these search facilities is an excellent way of making sure you reach a wider audience – especially in the mobile age where prospective customers have uninterrupted access to the internet.

Alt Tag Those Images...

Ever wonder how much meaningful traffic or links could come your way if you search-optimized your images? The answer might be, More than you'd expect.



Thanks to Google's universal search results, images can help you show up on the first page—or, in some cases, even at the top—of results lists. In the process, you can increase click-throughs, ad views, and AdSense impressions. Best of all, optimizing images could help you complete more leads.







Here are five ways to get your images to rank like a star:

Filenames. Use "jpg" or "gif" files, and include keywords in the image file names.

ALT Text. Use ALT Text for its intended purpose; but wherever appropriate, also incorporate keywords as signals for the search engines.

Headings and Bold Text. Optimize important images by using boldface or a heading tag with your targeted keyword, in the text immediately preceding the image.

Image Captions. When possible, place the search term at the front of the caption.

Image Size. For best results, use images that are larger than 100 x 100 and smaller than 1200 x 1200. Linking to a larger picture with thumbnails can also be helpful.


The Po!nt: Don't overlook image optimization. By applying a few SEO tactics, you can actually make a picture worth a thousand words!