Website Speed and Search Rankings

Google is constantly modifying its algorithm to sort sites based on keyword relevancy and while keywords and backlinks always have the lion's share in terms of weight, more and more seemingly minor factors are taken into account. For instance, take website speed. You might wonder what at all it has to do with search rankings but actually it is also a factor (though with minor importance, to be precise) that influences your position with Google.

How Website Speed Affects Rankings

First, if you expected that website speed influences your rankings big time, we need to clarify that this isn't so. While the two are related, you won't find a direct correlation – i.e. low ranking sites might load fast and vice versa.

The results depend on which metric you use to measure website speed. For instance, if you take into account the time needed to load the first byte of the page, then it turns out this is a huge factor because sites that are fast to load the first byte of a page typically rank higher in Google.

If you take other metrics into account – i.e. the time necessary to load the main content or the time it takes to load the complete page (with images and ads), then things change because it seems these two factors are not of that importance to Google.

Overall, it's believed that website speed has less than 1% effect on rankings. Google themselves have stated that they take website speed into account but they didn't disclose details about exactly what matters.

Nevertheless, many sites report increase in traffic (from search engines or otherwise) after they optimize their site for speed. This is a pretty good reason to do the same, if your site is slow – you are not doing it for Google, you are doing it for your users, your traffic, and your conversions. Website speed is key to user experience, so if your site is slow, there is no reason to keep it that way. What's the use of getting traffic from search engines, when your visitors have to hang for 10+ seconds before they can see your content – they will have left much before the page has loaded.

What to Do to Improve Website Speed

If you want to improve website speed, there are a couple of steps to be taken. First, you need to measure your website speed – otherwise how do you know it's slow?

1. Measure Load Times

In order to measure load times, you need a good tool. The choice here is quite rich. Pingdom Page Load Time tool and Google Analytics Site Speed reports give a good idea of your site's general performance. WebPageTest is a more advanced tool because it allows to test your site in different browsers and spot slow areas on your site.

These tests could take some time for a large site but since they give you detailed data about which parts are slow, just be patient. Good tools report not only the average site speed but elements, such as first byte, user time, time to fully load, percentage of images, htmls, JavaScript files, etc., which is useful later when you start fixing the problematic areas.

2. Move to a Faster Server

One of the obvious reasons a site is slow is that the server you are hosting it on is slow. The reasons here could be numerous – from a web hosting provider that lacks the capacity to offer fast servers, to the type of your hosting account.

The easier solution here is to upgrade your account. For instance, if you have a large site with many pages and frequent database reads/writes and you are still using a shared account, then no provider to Earth can offer the speed you need. In this case, if you are happy with the provider per se, your solution is to upgrade from a shared account to VPS (Virtual Private Server) or even to a dedicated server. The costs for VPS or a dedicated server a month are much higher than what you are paying for your shared account but if your site is making you money (or at least has the potential to), the problem with website speed is literally killing your business.

On the other hand, if your web hosting provider is not good even if you upgrade your account, this won't solve your problem. The only thing you can do is migrate your sites to a good web hosting provider. Here is a list of some of the best web hosting providers for you to choose from.

3. Optimize Your Site's Code and Images

Your server might be fast but if your site itself is slow, you will still experience speed issues. If your code and images are not optimized for fast loading, you won't see speed improvements till you fix them. This task could take a very, very long time, especially if your code and images are bloated but you've got to do it.

For images, you can use compression and/or smaller sizes. This will speed loading big time. For HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other Web languages there are tons of tricks (and tools) how to optimize your code.

Website speed is not a factor with huge importance for search engine rankings, though it does count. The bigger problem with slow sites is that they are not user–friendly, which in turn kills conversions. If you don't want to lose money because of the speed issues of your site, take the time to fix them – it will pay in the long run.

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Sub Domains vs Sub Directories ‐ Which Is Better for SEO?

The URLs and the navigation of a site do matter for SEO but the elements of site structure that affect SEO don't end here. For example, take sub domains and sub directories. These are another example of a site's structural elements that do influence how Google ranks results. While the difference between when a page is in a sub directory (also called a sub folder) vs when it's on a sub domain might not be always huge, there are cases when it really matters if you use sub domains or sub directories.

The Difference Between a Sub Domain and a Sub Directory

Before we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of sub domains and sub directories for SEO, let's clarify the difference between them.

Basically, when you use sub domains, your URLs will look like this:

subdomain.domain.com

Notice the 'subdomain' part before your main domain. This part tells Google and your visitors that the contents in the sub domain is separate from the contents of the rest of your site. A typical use for sub domains is for a business site where the blog is separate from the rest and it resides on a subdomain of its own ‐ i.e. blog.companysite.com. Sites with forums (and other content, for instance articles) also frequently separate the forum part on a sub domain, such as forum.contentsite.com.

Unlike sub domains that precede the domain name, sub directories follow it. Like this:

domain.com/subdirectory

The difference is not purely in the syntax. It goes beyond that and it's related to the type of content you have. There isn't a rule when to use sub domains and when to use sub directories but basically if the content is a good candidate for a separate site, then you go with sub domains. If the content isn't that much different from the main content, you go with sub directories. For instance, if you have a blog about web design, you can have separate sub directories for tutorials, free stuff, your artwork, etc., but put the shop where you sell templates and designs on a separate domain.

SEO Benefits of Sub Domains

It's hard to say if sub domains are better for SEO or not because it depends on many other factors. However, one of the cases when you would benefit from a separate domain is when you have multiple pages for a single keyword.

Google usually limits the number of search results per domain, unless they are very relevant but this doesn't apply to sub domains. In other words, if you had a domain with sub directories and you have 10 relevant results, most likely Google will show only 2 or 3 of them, while if you had 5 sub domains, chances are 2 or 3 results per sub domain (or 10-15 altogether) will be shown. However, don't take this for granted and don't rush to sub domaining just to trick Google to show more results from your site ‐ this might not work and you will have wasted your time and effort.

Another advantage of sub domains for SEO is that you can put your keywords as sub domain names. This is especially good, if your main domain name lacks them ‐ i.e. if your main domain is healthsomething.com but you have lots of stuff about addiction, it makes sense to create a separate sub domain addiction.healthsomething.com with your keyword in it. Of course, you can do this with sub directories as well but somehow a separate sub domain with your keywords has more weight.

SEO Drawbacks of Sub Domains

The advantages of sub domains for SEO are tangible, however they also have drawbacks. For instance, sub domains are harder to set and manage.

Another disadvantage, and it's a major one, is that sub domains don't always inherit metrics from the main domain (i.e. if your main domain is PR5, your sub domains could be PR0 because for Google both are not closely related). In many cases, this alone is enough to make you give up the idea of using sub domains at all ‐ since the sub domains are not inheriting metrics, this means you practically have to optimize them from scratch.

SEO Benefits of Sub Folders

If you expect a longish list of SEO benefits of sub folders, there is no such list because basically sub folders have only two advantages.

First, similarly to sub domains, with sub folders, you can have the keyword in your URL. Second, sub folders inherit the metrics of your root domain, which means that if your site is doing well on a whole, any content in a sub folder automatically benefits from this, while with sub domains you might have to start your SEO efforts from the very beginning.

SEO Drawbacks of Sub Folders

The main SEO disadvantage of sub folders is that they could limit your exposure, if search results are already saturated with pages from your site. As I already mentioned, Google generally limits the number of search results per domain to 2 or 3, so if you have more pages that are relevant, they might not show in the main search results.

When to Use a Sub Domain and When to Use a Sub Directory?

Use sub domains for larger topics ‐ i.e. if you have a health site, it makes sense to create separate domains for each major group of diseases (i.e. cardiovascular, respiratory, etc.) and then create a sub folder for the separate diseases in this group (i.e. heart attack, flu, etc.)

Also, as already mentioned, if your site has a forum and or/a a blog in addition to your corporate pages, you should use sub domains for the forum and the blog ‐ i.e. forum.domain.com and blog.domain.com.

Of course, these are just general recommendations and you don't have to follow them blindly. As usual, the ultimate test is to try and see what works for you and what doesn't.

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How to Get Traffic from Tumblr

Social media do take lots of time but if you are seeing a return on your investment there, you are most likely looking for more good social media sites to expand to. While there isn't a shortage of social media sites, some of them are just a waste of time and effort, so you'd better skip them and head to the ones that work.

It is not that hard to find good social media sites. For instance, Tumblr might not be as big as Facebook or Twitter, but it is a popular blogging and social networking site, so you might want to explore it as well. Most of the tips for getting traffic from social media sites in general apply to Tumblr as well but as you will see, there are some specific ones that are tied just to it.

1 Post All Types of Media You Can

Tumblr offers multiple types of media for you to post. These types include: text, photo, quote, link, audio, and video and the best you can do is use them all. Of course, if your content is not fit for a particular type of post, don't force yourself to post that particular media ‐ i.e. if your products are not visual, video and even photos might be an overkill. You can post things that are directly related to your business and niche but you can also post more fun stuff that will appeal to the general audience.

2 Post Memes

One of the specific things about Tumblr is that of all sorts of media, memes are especially popular. Memes aren't very hard to create, so if you can't find cool ready-made ones, take the time to create a couple of memes yourself, post them, and see if they get the response you are hoping for. If they do, invest more time and effort (or even consider hiring somebody else) to create more memes.

3 Add Many and Relevant Tags

Tags on Tumblr are very important because this is the main channel through which users will find you. This is why it makes sense to add as many (but relevant) tags as possible. Look for variations and synonyms of your target keywords, and include them all. It goes without saying, though, that you shouldn't become a tag spammer.

4Create an Excellent Profile

As on all social media, your profile is your business card. Therefore, you can't afford to have a messy profile. You need to create an excellent profile so that other users like you ‐ this increases the chance of getting more followers.

5 Be Active and Regular

If you don't already know that social media do take time daily, now you will learn it. The key to getting and keeping an active and loyal following on Tumblr is to be active and loyal yourself. It's better to post a link a day than post 10 links at once after you have been gone for 10 days because in the first case your followers will have the habit of checking the daily stuff from you, while in the second case they will never know when you will post and might miss your multiple posts.

6 Interact with Other Users

Another trick to becoming popular on Tumblr is to interact with other users. Follow them, comment on their posts, reblog their stuff ‐ this all helps to become a Tumblr star whose posts are read by many users.

7 Reblog, Reblog, Reblog

When you find a good post from somebody else, don't hesitate to reblog it. This way you are feeding your audience with new stuff, while at the same time the original author will be thankful and might reblog some your original posts in return.

8 Quality Matters More than Quantity

When we say to be active in posting and interacting with other users, this doesn't mean you should spam and nag ‐ it's better to post less frequently, if you have nothing relevant to post than to post junk every day just for the sake of it. You might think of filler posts (i.e. funny stuff that supposedly appeals to everybody) and have some of these in stock, so you can post them when you have nothing better but don't post meaningless posts just to fill your daily quota.

9 Blog Around a Niche

While nobody limits your topics, for best results, you'd better narrow down your choices to topics from one niche. Tumblr is especially good, if you need niche traffic, so if you have multiple niches, you'd better create separate profiles for each of them than mix them all in one profile.

10 You Can Advertise Yourself but Do It with Measure

Tumblr allows to place ads in your posts, so you can advertise yourself, your site, or your products but do it once a week at most; otherwise, you will irritate your followers really soon and the effect you will achieve will be just the opposite to what you want. Resist the temptation to post ad, if the ad itself is not cool, or if the product/service you are promoting is far from excellent. You need to do this only once and many of your followers will drop you right away.

Tumblr doesn't have the huge number of users of Facebook but the good thing is that your competition isn't that huge either. If you have good stuff to post and you are persistent, sooner or later you will get noticed. And who knows, even if Tumblr isn't the first choice for many other webmasters, it might turn out that for you personally it works like a charm. In fact this is what matters most ‐ if it works for you, not for the whole world.

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