You may have already heard that site speed is now a factor in your website's search engine rankings – especially for Google. In this article, I'm going to attempt to identify the who, what, when, where, why, and how to improve for your website. Wish me luck!

1. Why, Google, WHY?!

First of all, Google is on a kick to make the internet faster – which I think is great! With ISPs providing faster download and upload speeds, computers becoming faster and more powerful, and searchers becoming more impatient – who really wants to have a website that is slow and bulky? No one.

The bottom line here is that speed has been shown and proven to increase conversions. Shopzilla and Firefox have both spent resources in testing the increases in speeds and nothing else – not a single content change. Shopzilla saw a 7-14% increase in conversions, and Firefox saw a 15.4% increase in downloads – just from changing their site speed! This what just from making tweaks in their speed.

The second issue is that if you have a faster site, your users will be happier. You'll increase your user's satisfaction. Microsoft and Google teamed up and did an experiment in which they gave some users delayed results. They found that the more the delay, the more unhappy a client was.

The third issue is that slower website speeds produce long term negative results for the end user. Again, Microsoft and Google teamed up and gave users a half a second delay. They found that the users who received these results showed a decrease in query volume. At 7 weeks, they reset these users, and the query volume went up, but not to the same levels.

Although speed is a factor, content and relevance are still the primary ranking factors.

2. Steps to improve your website's speed

First of all, it's important to know that 80-90% of the end user response time is spent on the front end. Images, Flash, and other objects that will be displayed are going to take immense amounts of time to download. When you decide to start optimizing for speed, start on the front end! There is a greater potential for improvement, it's simpler to do, and it has been proven to work. Although one would think that optimizing your database or scaling your architecture would help more, it doesn't.

Second, a question arises – how the heck do you know if your website is slow or not? I think the first place to start is to head over to http://www.webpagetest.org where they have an absolutely excellent speed test. It's very in depth and will even give you ideas on how to optimize your website for speed! It's amazing how much time it took to download my simple blog – over 7 seconds!

Now, Webmaster Tools has a section called "Site Performance" which will give you a pretty good idea of how your website is doing. It will not only tell you what your website page load time is and it will compare it to other websites throughout the web.

There is also a Firefox plugin called "Page Speed" that you can run on ANY URL. It will give you very specific recommendations and ideas to help your website have an decrease in page load times.

About the Author: Andrew Hallinan is the owner of Tampa search engine optimization company, and is Tampa Bay's leading Search Marketing Specialist. Andrew Hallinan has more free tips and advice at his blog.

Although extremely hard to pronounce, canonicalization is a hot topic right now. Google's latest and greatest idea, canonicalization is the process of consolidating all duplicate URLs to one original canonical version. If there are a lot of URLs that lead to pretty much the same page, you're going to make the search engines work extra hard and spend a lot more time crawling all the different URLs. Often times, this means that they'll miss the important pages of your website because your crawl time is limited or too slow.

Here are some times when canonicalization is an issue:

1. When you have not redirected www and non-www versions of the website and they both resolve
These versions will be the same – but ideally, you need a 301 or permanent re-direct from one to the other in order to deliver the best possible results. Without this simple server redirect in place, you basically have two websites that will be indexed by the search engines – which spells bad news for your results.

2. You've changed your URL structure so that your information and content still exists on both the new and old versions
Obviously, you don't want to lose traffic that is linking to or visiting the new content. In this situation, a 301 redirect is important to use and is usually the best possible way to redirect your traffic – especially since both the search engines and web browsers can follow a 301 redirect. (A 302 redirect can only be followed by a web browser and not a spider)

3. Your URL structure generates infinite URLs
If you have a dynamically generated URL structure that could generate an infinite amount of URLs, you'll be in trouble! This generally happens in large e-commerce websites that have tons of product listings that can be sorted by price, size, closest to you, color, etc. If the website generates a different URL for each of these results, you could spell trouble. Most often, the reason that this is set up this way is so that your marketing department can add a tracking code to the URL to keep track of the campaigns.

Here's an example – let's say you have a new shoe campaign and your marketing department is sending out direct mail pieces, has an email marketing campaign, a blogger relationship database, and just search engine traffic. If the email url is "www.example.com/email", direct mail is "www.example.com/dmail", etc. then you can have a bunch of URLs for the same content.

If a spider suspects that the page can load with infinite URL variations, it can fall into a "spider trap" and stop indexing your website. Since there is limited resources for the spiders to crawl your website, important content may be left uncrawled. When this happens, it's a great idea to use a canonical meta tag or Google Webmaster Tools parameter handling tool.

4. Your pages are blocked by the robots exclusion tag
As you probably know, the robots.txt exclusion helps you block out search engines from indexing the information on your website that you don't want it to index. While it's a good practice to use this tag on occasion, it's very easy to accidentally block the spiders from indexing pages that are relevant and helpful. If your website isn't being properly indexed – this is the first place I'd look.

About the Author: Andrew Hallinan is the owner of Tampa search engine optimization company, and is Tampa Bay's leading Search Marketing Specialist. Andrew Hallinan has more free tips and advice at his blog.

Could you imagine what it would be like if you could make Google bow to your every whim and desire? What if you could be at the top of the search engines for every search term that you wanted to be on top for – without spending a dime on PPC? You could rule the business and informational world! Alas, we all bow down to Mother Google and Queen Yahoo!, but there are some ways that we can direct the search giants (including Bing) in how they view your website and what functions to perform while visiting. This article will discuss the fine points of your robots.txt file, your robots meta tag, and even the new nofollow HTML attribute.

1. Don't use the Whitehouse.gov's website as an example for your robots.txt file

Now-a-days, if you don't disallow the search engines from indexing your website, they will default to indexing it. There's no real need to "allow" Google, Yahoo!, or Bing to access your website – the will by default.

If, however, you wish to keep the robots off of your website (maybe during development, a redesign, or whatever), use the following in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

This will block Google from indexing your entire website.

To make all of the search engines blocked:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Now, in some cases you'll want to block the search engines from indexing only a specific directory or subdirectory on your website. Here's what that'll look like in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /yoursubdirectorynamehere

Make sense?

Now, here's a hint – if I were you, I'd make folders on my server before the development of my application that were for "allow" and "no_allow" folders. This doesn't necessarily benefit the search engines, but the alternative is having a 200 line robots.txt file that mirrors the stupid robots.txt file found on the previous Whitehouse.gov robots.txt file. (http://web.archive.org/web/20070217205444/www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt)

2. Disallowing a cached version of your website

If you don't want the search engines to send a searcher to the search engine's stored cached version of your website, you would use the following meta tag:

Generally, webmasters use this in cases in which a page is constantly updated and refreshed, and the previous copy that might have been stores on the search engine is no longer applicable to the searcher.

3. Controlling Snippets
I bet you don't know what a snippet is, do you? A snippet is the couple of lines of words that are displayed under your website's title on the search results. Sometimes it comes from your meta description tag, but often times, it comes from a snippet of your page that Google deems relevant. It's been proven that when Google produces these snippets, people actually click your link more often because they see how relevant the website will be.

However, there are times when you simply want Google to obey – and to display exactly what is contained in your search engine results snippet. For example, if you are a newspaper and your website is updated several times a day, Google may not have time to re-index your website, and so your snippets would be detrimental to your click through rates.

In that case, here's what meta tag would look like:

About the Author: Andrew Hallinan is the owner of Tampa search engine optimization company, and is Tampa Bay's leading Search Marketing Specialist. Andrew Hallinan has more free tips and advice at his blog.

Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all have heavy duty ways to crawl each and every website on the internet. This is a huge job and it takes up tons of resources – which is why they don't ever want to make sure that they don't "over" crawl any one website. They simply don't want to over burden their already resource intensive crawls. For that reason, most search engines only spend a limited amount of time crawling any one website. Here are some factors that can influence your crawl allocation:

1. Server response times
The search engines, with Google leading the pack, are trying now more than ever to increase the speed of the internet as a whole. If your server is slower than your competition's, and your website responds to requests too slowly, the search engine spiders may slow their crawls of your website down to make sure that they are not overloading the server.

2. Page load times
It's simple, really – the faster your individual pages load, the more pages of your website the spiders can crawl! If you have a 100,000 page website and the crawler takes a second per page, that's way too long. You can actually monitor your own page load times in your Google Webmaster Tools accounts.

3. Your content
You content MUST be unique. Autoblogs, automatic RSS feeds, and other forms of using dynamically distributed content are great – but if they are the only way your website gets traffic, you'll never dominate the search engines. You must have unique content that is relevant for the searcher and search phrase. If there is too much duplicate content, or you have too many pages with thin content, the search engines won't be crawling your website too often.

4. URLs, redirects, and missing pages
For whatever reason, there can be issues with the crawler crawling your website. It can get stuck in a redirect loop or have any other number of problems with crawling your website. You can view your crawl report and diagnose/troubleshoot problems from your Google Webmaster Tools account. Chances are pretty good that if Google has had problems crawling your website, Yahoo! and Bing will have problems crawling as well.

5. Server efficiency
You can lessen your server's resources that the spiders are allowed to use by creating compressed files and if-modified-since methods on the server. This is a great way to reduce your bandwidth. This isn't a problem for small websites, but when it comes to a website with 100,000 pages or unique products, the bandwidth can be very costly. If you use the if-modified-since portion of your server, it will return a 304 (not modified) response to the bot when it's requesting a web page that has not been modified since the last time it's contents were indexed. You can find out much more about this by visiting http://janeandrobot.com/library/managing-robots-access-to-your-website

6. Bot efficiency
You can adjust the crawl times of both Bing and Yahoo!'s bots by using a crawl-delay setting in your robots.txt file. If either of these seem too slow, see if an entry in this file exists. Another good way of being able to tell if the other bots are indexing too slowly is by checking on Google's own crawl speed – it may be a good indicator as well.

About the Author: Andrew Hallinan is the owner of Tampa search engine optimization company, and is Tampa Bay's leading Search Marketing Specialist. Andrew Hallinan has more free tips and advice at his blog.

As you well know, it's extremely important to have the proper site architecture, technical requirements, and site infrastructure which is important for the search engines. With that said, I've found that most web developers are just that – web programmers who may not know the full effect of their core SEO strategies or marketing strategies. Most web programmers that I've worked with understand their jobs and their roles in the company very well and quite simply are unaware of the latest SEO trends or search algorithms and how they play a vital role to the search engine rankings of my client's website. Being able to work directly with these technical savvy professionals is a core requirement for any SEO firm or consultant that you bring on to help you with SEO. Keep these ideas in mind when trying to communicate with these types of people.

Remember the "good to great" methodology.
Most programmers and developers may not have the same personality traits as your management team or customer service teams. Keeping that in mind, some programmers and developers may be a bit resistant to training, advice, or direction from someone who is not a programmer or developer. This can cause conflict between the two parties and be detrimental for the overall goals of your SEO campaign.

Over the past few years, I've managed to gain excellent skills in handling these situations. The first thing to do when speaking to a programmer (or group of developers) is to clearly establish that these developers have more training, experience, and programming experience than you do (even if you think that they don't!) Acknowledge that they have done a good job with SEO up until that date, and that you've been brought in to bring them from good to great – NOT from bad to good.

Communicate best practices clearly and often.
Although I may not directly understand the relationship between variable functions in PHP programming versus ASP direct subsequent variations, I do understand SEO and how it relates to programming. Web programmers and developers need to understand the principles of searchability and absolutely need to build these techniques into their programming. Web programmers also need to have a set of standards and best practices for editing and modifying the website architecture – and to address any relevant problems that the website may have.

For example, there's been a lot of buzz going around about Google's new site speed factor in rankings. This has created quite a bit of panic in some of the major websites that have speed issues. Understandably, it's very important that a website can compete and stay on top of the game with fast load times and crawl rates. Addressing these concerns with a firm but gentle approach with your developers is best – instead of, "Our site loads extremely slowly, you need to fix it," try using a different approach. Explain the situation, explain why speed is now a factor in search results, and encourage the developers in their work. Try saying something along the lines of, "Google has just announced that speed is a major factor in our website rankings. Our website isn't as slow as some of our competition, but this is an area where we can really get to the top of the game and steal some great momentum to beat out the competition. We need to really focus on site speed and using our best practices in this area – look out for a company memo to be distributed later on these subjects."

About the Author: Andrew Hallinan is the owner of Tampa search engine optimization company, and is Tampa Bay's leading Search Marketing Specialist. Andrew Hallinan has more free tips and advice at his blog.