Archive | Dec, 2009

Google Caffeine and Website Speed

With the imminent launch of the project Google caffeine – Google’s new search algorithym which is said to be twice as fast as the current search algorithym, your website loading speed could have a dramatic effect on your search engine rankings. Certainly Matt Cutts from Google suggested Google will be looking far more closely at this in the new year. So what can you do to make your website perform as quickly as possible? Our top 5 tips would be:

1. Choose a great web hosting service with no downtime (or as little downtime as possible).
2. Try to have as little javascript on the actual web page itself, ideally place the javascript all into one file and compress this file – this will enable the web page to load quicker.
3. In the same vain as the javascript, try to place all your CSS files in the same files and compress these in the same manner as the javascript files.
4. If you website has to use images, try to compress these files as small as possible, otherwise image overload could seriously slow down your website speed.
5. Try to remove any unnecessary coding from the actual web page itself. If you have Google Analytics installed (or other analytics / tracking software), place this at the end of the web page coding (just before the </body> tag), rather than at the beginning of the coding.

Google launch goo.gl – a url shortener

Google have recently announced they have launched a url shortening service called goo.gl.

At the moment this will only be available using the Google toolbar or feedburner (that is you cannot visit the goo.gl website and shorten your URL there, in the same way you can with bit.ly).

However we think it will only be a matter of time before Google launch this fully, which will be a shame for the existing URL shortening providers currently out there.

Google Realtime Search

Google realtime search has just hit these shores (not on Google Ireland just yet) – essentially when you do a search on any topic (not sure at this stage how popular this needs to be), you will see a scroll down box which includes real time search results, which essentially is tweets from twitter. The great thing about this is that if you stay at the top of the scroll down box, you can see the new tweets on the subject instantly – fantastic tool – thanks to Google & Twitter for this.