You can check the loading time of your website in your Google Webmaster Tools account (which will also tell you whether its performing well compared to other sites), or you can use free online tools like http://tools.pingdom.com/.

So what steps can you take to ensure your site loads as fast as possible?

• Reduce the size of your images: Having lots of large images on your site will slow it down. Make sure you’re using small file-types such as .gif’s and keep the size to a minimum. There are free services such as http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/ which will reduce the size of your images for you
• Keep images to a minimum: Don’t use images to display text – this is bad in terms of load speed, but also SEO. Search engines can’t crawl text built into images, so you may be harming your site by adding text this way. Using CSS you can pretty much make text look anyway you want to anyway, so there’s no need to use images to present text
• Avoid tables: Use DIVs for layout if possible
• Keep your CSS and Script files externally: Try not to include your Javascript or CSS code in your HTML documents. Create separate files and then call out to them when you need to
• Clean up your code: You can use free tools like CSS Tidy and Clean CC to help clean up your code. Remember to take a backup of your files before you start optimising though – you don’t want to accidentally ‘tidy away’ some key bits of code!
• Use trailing slashes: This is just a small one but it helps. If you have a folder called ‘blog’, link to http://www.SMEketing.com/blog/ instead of http://www.SMEketing.com/blog
• Avoid excessive use of flash: Flash isn’t the demon it used to be, but try not to go OTT. Heavy usage will seriously slow your site down
• Invest in a good quality hosting provider: Sometimes the cheapest isn’t always the best.

Have you ever had any issues with load speeds? Have you got any other suggestions? Let us know in the comments below.

• What is Google Webmaster
• Adding Your Website To Google Webmaster

There is a huge amount of valuable information that you can get from Google Webmaster, but you need to know where it is, and what to do with it.

Firstly, you should submit an xml Sitemap. This is basically a list of all the URLs in your website. It helps to tell Google about all your pages; including pages which for some reason or another they may not be aware of.

There are many reasons Google may not crawl every page on your site naturally, so this is why Sitemaps are helpful. Google states, that Sitemap’s are useful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

To create an xml Sitemap:

• Visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ add your site URL to the box (ignore the other boxes and options) and click on ‘Start’.
• You will then need to save this and upload the file to your website.
• Click on ‘Site Configuration’ and then ‘Sitemaps’
• Click on ‘Add a Sitemap’
• You will be presented with a box with your domain name with a field at the end of it – type in sitemap.xml and then click on submit.

And that’s it.  Google will tell you if there is a problem with your Sitemap, but if you have followed these instructions you should have submitted it successfully.

Our next post is the long overdue explanation of what information Google Webmaster Tools can give you and how to interpret the data to improve your website.

If you found this information useful, but feel like you don’t have time to manage your online marketing, please get in touch. We’re online marketing experts and love nothing more than getting stuck into websites, helping our customers get more business from their online endeavours! Email us today on info@SMEketing.com.

It’s extremely easy to use and is a vital tool in ensuring your website is performing as well as it should be. It also informs you of any issues that Google has with your site – giving you the opportunity to fix them, ensuring your site stays in Google’s good books!

So what can Google Webmaster do?

• It lets you check and set the crawl rate
• It lists internal and external links
• It gives you statistics about how Google indexes your site
• It allows you to submit an xml sitemap
• You can generate and submit a robot.txt file
• You can set a preferred domain – telling Google what you would like your site to be listed as
• See what popular keywords are being used to access your site and where your pages rank for those terms
• See any errors Google has come across while crawling your site

We will be giving more information on what these mean and how you can interpret the results to help improve your site in a future blog post.

You can find Google Webmaster here: www.google.com/webmasters/tools.

You’ll firstly need to log into Google Webmaster with your Google account (if you don’t have a Google account you can easily create one here). You’ll then have to add your site to Google Webmaster and verify it – if you’re unsure how to do this, don’t worry…

…our next blog post will outline how to add and verify your site within Google Webmaster.