We write about a lot of fancy stuff on the Portent blog, such as server log analysis, advanced keyword research, and Tom Cruise.

I want to address something that doesn’t have to be fancy: site speed. We’ve written two posts on how we configured Portent’s site: one is pretty advanced and the other is blindingly technical. They’re awesome, but what if you’re a small business owner without a geeky CEO or talented developer at your beck and call?

When talking to clients, I noticed that many conversations went something like this:

ME: HTTP compression is a breeze. Just have your dev team…

CLIENT: What is this “dev team” you speak of?

Even though Google’s PageSpeed Insights spits out a handy report, it doesn’t always translate to actionable recommendations for the beginner webmaster that updates a site on his or her own.

I’ll explain four simple ways to speed up your site without the help of IT support.

Image Optimization

Plan and simple: the smaller the file, the less time it will take for the browser to download and present it to the user. Images can be huge, so optimizing them is an easy place to start.

How to implement:

• Use software like GIMP to crop your images to the correct size for their particular application.
• Save it as the correct file type, which will likely be PNG or JPG.
• Compress it. You can use tools like jpegtran or PNGOUT; however, if you fear the command prompt, just use the compressed images Google provides in the PageSpeed Insights report. Click “See optimized content,” save the image, then replace your old, frumpy images with their slimmer counterparts.

Minification

Minifying a resource—be it a CSS, JavaScript, or HTML file—is simply the process of removing spaces, comments, tabs, and other unnecessary code in the file.

How to implement:

• There are many tools available for minification. Use Google’s Closure Compiler for JavaScript, YUI Compressor for CSS, and an HTML minifier for HTML. Again, it’s easiest to simply download the minified versions of the files PageSpeed Insights provides.
• If you’re running WordPress, you can take advantage of the minification settings in the W3 Total Cache plugin.

Compression

Compressing files also makes them smaller. Now that your site’s CSS, JS, and HTML are free of unnecessary code, compression is like putting them into a .zip folder. Most popular web servers have the ability to send the browser a compressed version of a file so it saves time loading the page. How to implement:

• If you’re using IIS, compression can easily be configured in IIS Manager; here are instructions from Microsoft.
• For Apache servers, you can utilize gzip encoding by adding a few lines to your .htaccess file.
  • First of all, messing up your .htaccess file can have devastating effects for your site if it’s not done correctly, so always have a working copy and edit with care.
• The .htaccess file lives in the root directory of your site and you can download it with your FTP client and edit it as you would any other text file. Your hosting provider might also give you access to it in your control panel.
• Add the following lines of code to the file:

<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>

When the browser tells the server it accepts compressed resources (excluding images), the above text tells the server to encode the content in a compressed format (gzip) and send the browser the smaller version of the file. Everyone is happy: the server, the browser, and the user.

• If you’re running WordPress and don’t want to get your hands dirty, I recommend using the WP .htacess Control plugin and enabling mod_gzip in the settings, which will add the relevant code to your .htaccess file for you.

Caching

Browsers are lazy and they don’t like to re-download files to render a site that it’s already seen before. So, it caches a lot of these files—images, CSS files, scripts—on the user’s hard drive in order to speed up the process of showing you a web page. Since files like your logo don’t change very often, you can instruct the browser to load the cached version so it doesn’t have to download the same image again from the server. We’ll do this by setting the expiration date for static resources up to a year in advance.

• In IIS, you can enable caching with the IIS Manager. Here’s a tutorial from Brad Kingsley.
• In Apache, add the following lines to enable mod_expiresthe .htacess file:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0

Then, define the file types it will affect:

<FilesMatch
“\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|js|css|txt|xml|flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav)$”>

Finally, set the time in the future it will expire:

ExpiresDefault A29030400
</FilesMatch>

The time is defined in seconds, so these files are set to expire a year in advance. AskApache offers a neat .htacess time cheatsheet if you hate counting.

• Again, if you’re using WordPress, I recommend W3 Total Cache. Just check the box next to “Browser Caching” in the settings menu and you’re good to go.

There are a bunch more ways to speed up your site, and many more resources than I have the space to list, but hopefully this will help get you started on your metaphorical journey to a faster site.

What are your favorite site speed optimization tips? Let me know in the comments!

The post SEO for Beginners: Improving Site Speed appeared first on Portent.

State of App Search: Needle in a Haystack

Have you ever tried to meet someone at Grand Central Station or some other incredibly crowded venue? It sounds so doable and yet it is so not. There are too many people, too many distractions and too much stuff in the way.

App (tablet and phone applications) stores, both iTunes and Google Play Store have the same problem. Both have in excess of 750,000 files to paw through, download, try, remove and lather, rinse and repeat. It is likely true that for any problem “there’s an app for that,” but not an app to find the app.

Now I know what you’re thinking. App stores are online and I can use the handy search feature to find the app of my dreams or needs. Well….maybe.  I ran a search using keyword productivity on both sites. In the search department, Google gets extra credit for a more pleasing search results display with icons, star ratings and a nifty description. However, points off for egregious self-promotion by soaking up 3 of the top 10 slots for Google Keep, Google Calendar (a productivity app?) and Google Drive.

Apple dispenses with search entirely and favors the top-down directory approach similar to that phone book you’re using to prop open the garage door (and equally as useful). An iTunes app category landing page is as easy to navigate as airport flight information boards. I am uncertain what the organization scheme might be, although it bears a striking resemblance to the one I use for my home office. I guess that Steve Jobs never had to use iTunes search or he certainly would have done something about that display.

So, if you want customers to find your app for either location, you will have to “make it so” yourself and here’s how:

On the page app optimization

As with traditional SEO, both app stores start with traditional information retrieval systems that emphasize the presence of the query terms in the body content and the placement on the page to put together a search results page. Position on this results page is based on magical thinking (for Apple) and a variety of algorithms (for Google).

Keywords

Apple encourages the assignment of keywords to your application and makes it as difficult as possible. They must be using some sort of Stone Age search in Cupertino, or they all know where everything is and do not need any sort of search functionality at all.

There is a 100 character limit to the keyword field that includes the required comma separators. There is no phrase matching. If you want your app to appear for a phrase like “business news,” the keywords would appear together, e.g. business, news. Google stopped paying attention to keyword metadata a long time ago and Google Play Store is no exception.

Name

For both the Google Play Store and iTunes, the presence of keywords in the app name is rewarded. The keyword-rich name should also include terms that reference the app’s functionality e.g. Weather+ International Travel Weather Calculator.

Apple limits the app name to 255 characters with full display on that page-o-links that serves as search results. For its Staff Picks on the Google Play homepage, app name display is limited to 17-21 (I have seen more at 17 than 21) characters (including spaces) with anything that follows represented by an ellipsis.

App icon

Icons are a very good idea and eye candy is the purpose. The icon appears on the download page as well as in the Google Play search results.

Details page

In iTunes, the details page is limited to 4,000 characters with 700 cited as a best practice. One screen shot is required with the ability to include four additional screen captures. The description of the application and functionality should be keyword-rich with a compelling call to action as customer interaction is a significant indicator of relevance. Additional components that can be included: an instructional video, customer ratings and reviews.

Categories

In iTunes the app will be listed under a primary category with the opportunity to select a second category for additional customer query option. The best practice recommendation is to use the customer pain point resolved as a guide for the second category.

Off the page factors that influence ranking

There are influences outside of download page text that can influence ranking in iTunes application search results. The primary off the page ranking factors are:

Downloads: the number and rate of downloads are key drivers of results placement.

Installation base: how many customers actually install the app.

Removals: whether customers dislike the app enough to shake off their lethargy to remove it entirely. Both Google Play and iTunes take note of uninstalls as an indicator of relevance.

Customer reviews and ratings: whether customers give you stars or actually write something down on the page. It is very important that you pay attention to the feedback from your users and respond in some way.

Recommendations

Optimize the application itself.

• Make sure that the performance speed is smokin’ fast
• Reduce the file usage weights
• Keep the application fresh with updates and enhancements

Build and sustain support from external assets.

• Website support: placement of a permanent download icon or graphic on your website
• Social media support: schedule tweets with a tiny URL, post to Facebook, pin on Pinterest and don’t forget regular updates on Google+ to sustain momentum

Reach out to key influencers.

• Contact app blogs and promotion networks to get them excited and talking about your swell new app!
• Encourage customer reviews and ratings

Gotchas for both

You will want to submit the app to both iTunes and Google Play Store at least two weeks before release as it takes time for the files to make their way through the Apple and Google processes. To do this, Google requires that you set up yet another account with the Google Play Developers Console to upload apps. The fee for doing so is $25. At least Apple lets you play without having to pay.

Is it just me or does this sound like the early days of SEO, the way it used to be 10 years ago with keyword sort-of-stuffing, key influencer outreach, and review “acquisition”? We might as well enjoy the waning days of this Luddite approach to SEO. No doubt Google is working on Panda-app as I write this post. Look for the icon below at the Google Play store. Or, more likely, it will come looking for you.

The post Get Found, Make Money: Optimizing Apps for Search appeared first on Portent.

Before I even became an SEO I learned to hate SEOs. After all, SEOs would take the beautiful, functional site the designers and developers spent their nights creating and cram it full of footer links, anchor text, H tags, nofollows, and any other piece of code they could think of until the site couldn’t breathe.

Next, SEOs would spend weeks plastering the website’s address anywhere they could; clogging up blogs, forums, and message boards. SEOs would then have their developers try new tricks and tactics to serve secret content and hide text in different places.

The brave new world of SEO

Then, one day all of that changed. Google cracked down on link spam. Bad practices were devalued. We could add fonts and functionality to sites in ways that didn’t hide the content. Designers, developers, and SEOs everywhere rejoiced, new friendships blossomed, and we all marched hand-in-hand to this new era of web design.

Except not really. In fact for many, all of those views out there about SEOs, what we do, and why we do the terrible things we do are just as they always have been. Most SEOs are familiar with developers that don’t take you seriously or designers that won’t take your calls. So what gives?

Common complaints about SEOs

To find out I decided to ask web designers, developers, and managers all over what they thought about SEO. I got 7 responses. Well, 8 if you count one response from a message board: “SEOs are spammers. There’s your quote.”

But let’s get to it. What’s going on here? Well, it turns out there’s lots of things SEOs are still doing wrong that we need to fix if we want others to take us seriously.

SEOs don’t get the big picture

“The priorities should just be dependent on the goals of the project. Sometimes SEO is the prime objective, sometimes it’s something else.” Rick Murphy, Web Designer, Hardly Code

“It’s very rare to find an SEO group who thinks about overall site experience, as opposed to magnifying the attractiveness of single screens. This myopic view is usually at the detriment of context or user interaction. It’s rare to find SEO teams that consider brand or experience as a factor in what they’re trying to accomplish.” Andrew Heaton, Web Designer, Revinity

SEO is an important part of the site. I mean without SEO no one will ever see your site, right? Well, here’s a hard truth for all SEOs:  Sometimes SEO is not the most important thing.

Are you OK? Things like making sure the cart works or incorporating the brand into the site often are, in fact, higher priorities. It’s true. We can huff and puff about how they don’t get it and how they need us, but that’s probably not going to help our likability.

Designers and developers have a million things to take into account when building a site, making our pleas to give all the images alt attributes seem like just another seagull squawking among a whole flock of irritating Internet marketers.

SEO involves a lot of different things and we need to be able to distinguish between a vital problem that will block the entire site and a minor change that will help a single page rank. This way our fellow webhead can prioritize our suggestions among the other countless things they need to make the site work; which brings me to our next problem:

SEOs don’t get what’s involved with the implementation

“As a product manager, I devote my energy to trying to come up with ways to improve user experience. With a complex website and a diverse audience, nailing down the right new feature is a daunting task. However, the experience of seeing that feature come to life and the anticipation of getting real user feedback is thrilling; that is, until I’m forced to roll it back on day 2 because—gasp!—we’ve experienced a rankings change.” Brittany McCullough, Program Manager, Guide to Online Schools

“Custom CMS builds mean sites are all different. Changing something may take 10 seconds or 2 hours; it all depends on how familiar I am with the CMS being used, and how well the templates were originally developed.” RJ LaCount, Web Designer, RJLaCount.com

A lot of SEOs aren’t designers. Some of us aren’t the world’s greatest coders either. Very few of us are programmers. So when we tell our clients to “consolidate images into CSS sprites” or “use more keyword-rich URLs,” how many of us actually know what that involves? What CMS is the site built on? How many of the images are actually able to be merged into a sprite? Tiled images in backgrounds can’t be used in CSS sprites; but all of you already knew that right?

When you casually tell another web professional to do something that requires a complete overhaul of the site, all you are doing is telling them that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about. How receptive do you think the developer will be the next time you give them a recommendation, especially ones that have less to do with their immediate skillset? Some of the more vague recommendations we give, in turn, lead into the next problem:

Unclear Justifications

“For our clients who may or may not be the most tech-savvy people on the planet, listening to us (the computer geeks) explain SEO to them, even in simplest terms possible, may still feel like they are sitting in a classroom being taught Japanese. Over the years I have gained quite a few analogies (thankfully) but still find this to be the most difficult part. A client that doesn’t understand how something could help their business is not going to buy a product, thus making client understanding a difficult but essential hurdle.” Danielle Nyhof, Web Interaction Designer, DK Designs

“Context, it seems, is the great missing variable no SEO group wants muddling up their equations: too squishy, too volatile, too hard to quantify.” Andrew Heaton, Web Designer, Revinity

Most of the SEOs I’ve met are pretty good talkers. We can talk about page authority, crawlers, link juice, canonicalization, C-blocks, trust flow, nofollowed links, and cross-domain snippet rank indexation (did I make that up?) for days and days and days. So what do all of those words and phrases have in common? They don’t actually mean anything. Seriously.

If you’re an SEO then they might make sense (though I would argue that we are overusing them) but to everyone else they’re gibberish. This makes it sound like a) You’re explaining something no one can possibly understand or b) You’re making it up. Designers, developers, managers, and other professionals are usually smart people. So they go with b. In fact, there is one very specific thing that all the web professionals have no problem calling us on:

We don’t know the algorithm either

“Search engines have the ability to change their algorithms at any time. I already have to devote a lot of my time to keeping up on development changes.” Chris McGrath, Web Application Developer, ChrisMcGrath.net

“They’re just as in the dark about what Google is doing next as anyone else, and building your strategy around certain tricks can sometimes backfire or have no effect at all.” Anonymous Web Designer

“Is this rankings change random? Maybe. Will it even last? Maybe not. Have we given the users a chance to give us feedback via their interactions? Definitely not.” Brittany McCullough, Program Manager, Guide to Online Schools

This is how this line of reasoning works.

SEO: You need us because the algorithm is always changing.

Experienced Web Professional: But you don’t know what the algorithm is, either.

SEO: …

Congratulations! You’ve not only killed your own credibility with your client, but mine as well. And all the other SEOs out there, too. We need to stop using “the algorithm” as a reason to do anything. We are helping people find websites. Yes, the algorithm is part of the process, but it’s not the reason. And as much as we might like to think we’re John Connor using his Atari Portfolio to hack into Google, we’re not. So we need to stop using this to make us sound more mysterious.

SEOs do real things. We identify traffic opportunities. We fix technical problems. We give content ideas. We don’t need to hide behind the facade of an advanced computer program we’re predicting because most of us aren’t doing that. Most are doing actual SEO work (see above). Another problem, though, is that some of us aren’t:

Some of us are still giving outdated advice

“I have read quite a few articles online from mom-and-pop SEOers (as I like to call them) who still believe in keyword stuffing. These individuals are the only negative experiences I have had recently as they are marketing themselves as knowledgeable SEOers and are filling the population of our potential clients with incorrect information and wildly high expectations.” Danielle Nyhof, Web Interaction Designer, DK Designs

“There’s no shortage of amateurs with a high profile in any field, and SEO is certainly no exception. We’ve all encountered the “SEO expert” who’s still working with methods and mentalities from years past, still clutching that last keyword choked meta tag as if it were a drop of virgin’s blood, a Gríma Wormtongue trying to sway the client with promises of free traffic and that top-spot on the first page of Google results.” Andrew Heaton, Web Designer, Revinity

Whether it’s out of laziness or stubbornness, people are still giving bad advice. Keyword stuffing, comment spamming, and footer links are all classic examples. Though Penguin, Panda and the other updates have definitely cut down on the bad advice being given these days, the bad aftertaste still lingers. Remember, Penguin is only 10 months old. That means for many web professionals, the last SEO they worked with could have been giving them all the same, spammy advice that they were using for years.

So what can SEOs do?

Now that we’ve identified some of the popular reasons why other web pros avoid us in the cafeteria, what’s the solution? Well, all of these complaints center around 2 things: knowledge and communication.

Know your stuff from top to bottom. Be able to explain how to implement page speed suggestions. Understand how the URLs are being generated. Be able to explain how to get text on the page without affecting the design. Familiarize yourself with how fonts work and how to position text. Boost up on trivia. For example, most SEOs know dashes are better than underscores. But can you explain exactly why? (Hint)

Then we need to be able to talk about it. Practice talking about how a site ranks without using SEO terms like link juice and domain authority. Be able to explain how the SEO process works at both a fundamental level and at a technical level.

But most of all, we need to stop trying to trick people and get better at we actually do. We do SEO and it’s a real thing. Because frankly, we were never really tricking anyone other than ourselves.

The post Why Web Professionals Hate SEOs appeared first on Portent.

If you want to call yourself a web designer these days, you’d better be ready to keep up. Daily study is required or you’ll be left in the dust.

I follow countless blogs, listen to podcasts during my commute, and work on random projects at home just to try out new things.

When I start talking about design, my friends’ eyes gloss over and they suddenly need to go home – but what can I say? I’m really into this stuff.

That being said, I have a confession that might make the modern web design community cringe a bit: I care about the fold.

The what?

“The Fold” is a dated concept originally stemming from printed newspapers. If you wanted your headline to pop, it needed to be no more than halfway down the page: the point where newspapers were “folded” for display.

When digital media burst onto the scene, the average screen resolution was 1024×768 (or if you lived on the bleeding edge, 1280×1024). Consequently, designers determined that the safe digital equivalent of “the fold” was 600px from the top of the page. If your content was below this point, it was less likely to be seen.

Now, things are a bit different.

In the future, that chart’s only going to become more fragmented. We’re already browsing the web on our phones, tablets and TVs. Pretty soon we’ll be browsing the web on our bathroom mirrors.

So, the fold is dead, right?

A few years ago, I was riding high on the “Fold Is Dead” bandwagon, preaching about how “users these days know how to scroll!”

But working at an Internet marketing agency that deals in real stats and analytics knocks you off that bandwagon real quick.

It’s still true: content above the fold gets looked at more than anything else.

But a couple of other things are also true:

1. Users are comfortable scrolling (especially on small / mobile screens).
2. The traditional approach to a quantifiable pixel number representing “the fold” is no longer relevant.

The fold is not dead… but you also shouldn’t be trying to force everything important above some arbitrary line.

Alright, I’m pulling my hair out now. What should I do?

Calm down, for starters.

The purpose of defining the fold was never to cram every possible thing above it. Because if everything is important, guess what? Nothing’s important.

Let’s go back to the fundamental: the whole purpose of considering the fold is to entice your audience to continue reading or, in the context of the web, scroll. Take a look at one of my favorite examples:

Life, Below 600px

Notice how there’s almost nothing above the fold on this page, yet it screams “scroll down and continue reading.”

Whether it’s the headline suggesting there is something interesting below or the giant glacier submerged just below the cutoff, you’re compelled to read more. Additionally, simple design and large typography make it less intimidating for the user to dive down into more content. This is how you use the fold.

What I’m hearing is that I should stop trying so hard…

Exactly.

Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I love the web’s current explosion of screen resolutions and form factors. It’s whipping a wicked curveball right to the high inside corner of all these “rules” – rules that have evolved over time into completely skewed versions of what they were originally intended to be.

Some of your “above the fold” content is inevitably going to be cut off.

The resolution of screens viewing the web is constantly improving. No one can predict what your site may look like on some Internet-capable washing machine or car dashboard of the future, so don’t blindly obey hard and fast design “rules” without question. The fold is a guideline, not a mandate.

If a user starts scrolling down your main page, the fold has accomplished its goal. Now all you have to worry about is the rest of the site! (No pressure or anything.)

Have you come across any great examples of sites using the fold correctly? Let us know in the comments.

The post Into The Fold: Why Web Design is More than One “Rule” appeared first on Portent.