With time being one of the business world’s most precious commodities, it is important that websites load quickly and completely – or you risk losing the prospective customer. As search engines like Google continue to develop their ranking algorithms, evidence is emerging that loading time is now included in their scoring systems. Consequently, how fast your site loads will have an impact on your site’s position in the search results.

The easiest and quickest way to reduce your loading time is to limit the number of web elements on each page. Elements include items such as scripts, images and any Flash components. Each element requires an http marker within the page’s code, creating http requests to the server for each component. The more elements you have, the more requests and the slower the page will load.

Ask yourself – for every piece of your webpage – what value does it add to my site, to my SEO and to my customers? If the answer is low or none, then cut it.

This doesn’t mean images should be avoided completely, but if they are essential, make sure they are optimised. Images should not be written into your code as they stand, but should be saved as suitable for web, with a screen-only resolution of 72 dpi and in GIF or PNG format. It also makes sense to resize the images so they reflect the size on screen.

For more information and advice on how to optimise your website design for the search engines, and ensure it loads in the shortest possible time, contact NSDesign for a free no-obligation consultation.

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With very little fanfare, Google has added a feature to their Search Engine that could have a big impact on how people use and “influence” the results.

Searchwiki is a new feature available to logged in Google users, which allows you to add, remove and “promote” any of the returned results from a specific search.  You can also add notes to any of the results, allowing you to leave little reminders about what you think of the site.

To see this in action:

Sign into your Google account (you’ll have one if you use GMail, Adwords, Google Calendar, or any of the online Google tools that require a login).  Then on the Google search page, do a search for “Glasgow Web Design“…  Then scroll right to the bottom, and click “See all notes for this SearchWiki” 

What you should see is our “notes” that we left for our own site, and confirmation that we “promoted” our link under this search term. 

Only you (while logged in) see the results re-organised the way you’ve specified, but other Google users DO get to see your comments, and also get to see which sites have been promoted or removed by other users.  Which brings up some concerns… 

What if someone writes a nasty (or libelous) note tagged to your site.  Eg: “don’t use these mechanics – they ripped us off”…  How does the owner of that garage reply, or ask Google to remove these comments?  What if he doesn’t even know such comments exist?  Will the volume of visitors slowly decrease until Google sends him no traffic?

If Google’s SearchWiki is indeed a wiki, then where are the methods to complain about a note, or request that factually incorrect notes be taken down.  Personally I think this new feature may do more harm than good…  and it’ll be interesting to see how Google deal with the barrage of complaints that they’re sure to get! 

Also – how long before the organic results (those that everybody sees on Google) actually start being influenced by “promoters” of sites?  If we get all our customers to “promote” the NSDesign website under the search term “web design”, will the fact that 1000’s of people have gone out of their way to tell google it’s a better site than the rest actually see Google move it up the organic results?  They say NO, but for how long…?

Read Google’s own announcement of SearchWiki at the Google Blog.

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