John Blackmore

Google Panda Strike Again!

Once again it looks like Google are refining it’s search algorithm with no less than 40 changes this February. If you aren’t seeing the effects yet I’m sure they will be filtered in over the coming weeks so pop over to the official Google blog and check out what’s changing.

I’ve not yet read the full list but I can guess what it’s going to say so my advice remains as always; build a site with good quality original content and become the best resource of information you can in your sector. Great content will be rewarded (unless it’s stolen by a more popular site in which case chances are your site will get canned for duplicate content).

Speed up page loads with head.js

Last year Google made some changes to it’s algorithm that meant that page load speed was becoming a contributing factor in it’s search engine ranking algorithm. This means that if your website loads slowly you could be suffering in the SERPs.

One way to streamline the loading of your site is to parallel load your JS files, and you can further improve load time by placing those JavaScript links at the bottom of your page.

Head.js aims to make this all easy for you, by allowing parallel downloads of JS files as well as a whole bunch of other nice features such as a CSS moderniser, HTML5 enabler, browser detection, feature detection and screen size detector.

In short it does the job of about 5 or more other scripts and it weighs in at just 6.4kb in minified form, so it’s small as well. Give it a go in your next project and see what it can do for you.

10 Elements of a Perfectly Optimized Page

Gareth Owen writes a great article that explains in simple terms exactly what you should be adding to your web pages to add quality and perk the interests of your favourite search engines at the same time.

I shall be saving this link to reference back to over the coming months for sure.