Video Transcript – SEO Speed Humps

SEO Speed Humps – original post here

Hey, welcome back rankers. I’m recording from home again this week. I’ve been working on this blogger’s product. This is a digital product for bloggers. An SEO system for bloggers, basically, and so I’m doing the work from here. So I thought well, I may as well record the show from here as well. So, if you hear barking or snoring neither of those things are from me. They’re from my three dogs.

Because I’ve been doing this product . . . By the way, it’s cold in Melbourne at the moment, hence the turtleneck. But soon we’ll be heading to Vegas, where it’s hot, apparently. So if you’re gonna be in Vegas on the 20th or the 21st of August then come and say hello at the ThinkGlobalRetail conference. I’ve got a booth there and I think I’m on a panel or two as well. So, come and check us out there. But before that, we’ll be heading to the ProBlogger training event on the Gold Coast. So, I’m getting out of the Melbourne cold and going into the heat. Yay!

The ProBlogger event, I’m going up there to talk to bloggers and for this product that we’re creating. And I’ve already spoken to a heap of bloggers in the ProBlogger Facebook group. And they all seem to have some common issues. I spoke about some of them last week, but I wanna just tell you about just one this week, because I’ve just gone through this exercise with one of the bloggers, Michelle. Hi Michelle. It was all about speed. Now, usually as an SEO with search console or webmaster tools, as you probably know it, there is a little thing called crawl stats, under crawl, Crawl Stats. It tells you how many pages Google’s crawling a day plus how many kilobytes Google’s downloading a day.

My puppy is about to destroy my camera.

It’s only a 7D for God’s sake. Sorry about that. It was the $400.00 microphone I was really concerned about. Yes, that’s all. Okay.

So this, under crawl stats, green graph down here is telling us page load times, or time spent downloading a page in milliseconds. Now, you know, we always like to see this under a second, and if we see it under a second or around a second, we think things are usually pretty good, but I hadn’t seen this before. When I cross checked it with the Google page speed tool. I’ll show you what I mean.

So this is the Google Page Speed Tool. So, that site I was just looking at, that’s Keep Calm, Get Organized. That’s Michelle’s site. There you go. Well, the highest it’s been over the last 90 days is 1.5 seconds. And this is a measure of the Google Bot and how long it takes to grab a page. So, it’s an average across the site essentially. When I go and have a look at page speed, you can see here it says, well, that you URL is 27/100, that domain name. That’s bad by the way. The main reason, and it’s got a whole heap of things that need to be fixed here, but, one of the main reasons that this has got such a low score is because the size of the images on the site. Now, a lot of you go, “Well, that’s kind of old school. Isn’t it?” We can have big images now because we’re all on broadband. Well, yeah, kind of, yeah. It doesn’t take as long to download a one Meg file as what it used to back in the olden days. However, what if your competitor is equal on every other SEO element, but they’re twice as fast? Who do you think Google is gonna send them to first? It’s gonna send them to your competitor because they’re faster. It’s a better user experience.

The users hate slow sites, right? So, especially if you’re on a mobile and you’re in a category, like most of us, where mobile is pretty much doubling every year, then people aren’t gonna want to use your site if it’s really slow.

Now, we’ve been looking into this for ourselves as well, because we’ve been getting hammered recently and even as late as last night, we had a timeout on the site because we were getting hammered. So, we’re moving to better hosting.

So there’s a few things I wanna just quickly talk you through about making your site faster and they’re not hard. First thing: get your images small. If you don’t use Photoshop or anything like that, you don’t use your graphics tool and you’re not a graphics person, there’s some simple tools out there and probably one of the easiest and simple ones out there is kraken.io. So that is K-R-K-E. Yeah there it is, kraken.io.

Now, I’ve been using just the free version of this and it’s really quite good. So, you just upload an image to this and it compresses it. It keeps the quality really well. I’ve had reductions in size of 80% for some images that I’ve been uploading to this and it keeps it pretty high quality. I think what it’s doing, for the most part, and I haven’t looked at the algorithms here, is basically reducing number of colours in, say, a jpeg, using the jpeg compression. For me, who I’m not a designer, if I look at that one image against the other image, I can see yeah I think there’s a difference, but I don’t know what.

You might be, if you’re in industry in fashion, you’re a retailer, or you’re doing something that has to look absolutely beautiful and wonderful, you might think twice about using a tool like this. You might want to go into Photoshop and compress those images ’til you get it looking really, really nice, but you’ve got to get the images smaller. The smallest that you can get the image with a standard of quality that you’re happy with, that’s what you should be going for: as small as possible.

I was talking to Michelle at Keep Calm, Get Organized today and she put up a new page. It got a zero out of a hundred for the Google Page Speed Tool and that was because she had one image on the page that was three and a half megabytes or something, so don’t do that.

The other things that you can be doing are all on the server side. I would normally . . . You can look at the Page Speed Tool. It will tell you about those things that you’re not doing. Here this leverage browser caching, minify JavaScript, these are all standard things that we will do to a site. Another tool that you can use is webpagetest and the reason I like this one is that it gives you a graphical representation, whereas the Google Page Speed Test, because we’re a bunch of geeks, they just give you all text. This one gives us a nice graphical representation of what’s wrong. A lot of the server side stuff, just ask your web developer or whoever’s in charge of your hosting to go and fix those things. They include enabling compression on the web server. Basically, all that does is that someone over here on their browser says, “I wanna look at your webpage,” the web server goes, “Here’s the webpage. We’re just gonna compress all the files and send them across to you,” and then at the other end it decompresses the files. That’s the way the compression stuff works and it just speeds up the whole environment for the user.

I’m just gonna start this test. Now things that can cause issues when you’re trying to fix speed are things like enabling a cache. And a cache on the site is basically just if the user’s been here before just giving them the same page. If they’ve been here in, you know, the course of a day or two. It’s nice and quick because and everything already on their browser from the last time that they visited. That can get you a little bit of trouble sometimes if you’ve got users logging in all the time because you might want to show them something different and they’re just gonna get the same stuff that they got last time, which is not what you want. You’ve got to be careful with some of those things and some of the plugins and how they work on the various platforms can also cause problems.

You can see here, we’ve got . . . We haven’t set this cache static content. That’s basically the web server telling the browser, “You wanna cache this image because I’m not gonna change it.” Things like background images. Things like logos. Things that you shouldn’t have to download every time you visit the site. Okay? So, there’s the image side of things that you can compress. But the reason I’m telling you about this is because that metric inside of search console, the page load times, it is not looking at images. And it was made abundantly clear to me today when I saw zero out of a hundred on Page Speed Test and yet the site was loading. The average load times were around a second.

Google doesn’t, at least last time I checked, put in images in its index and the reason I know that is because if you’ve ever looked at a cached version of a site, sometimes the images are broken. I’ll give you a quick example of what I mean by that. So if I go . . . Well, I won’t even show you because it’s gonna take too long. The show’s going too long already, but, Google doesn’t download images and put them in its database. The search console figure that you see of around a second is without images. Alright? So, get those images nice and small.

The other thing that you can do, that’s gonna speed up your site, is get yourself on to a dedicated IP. There are a bunch of tools out there to find out how many other websites are also sharing the same IP address as you and one of the ones I use looks a little bit spammy, but it works. I’ve tested it. It’s called yougetsignal.com. For instance, if I was to put keepcalmgetorganised.com.au on here, just wait for that to do its thing, and this isn’t 100% accurate because the way that this tool works is that it looks at links to sites and looks at the IP address. This one here, it says, “Found two domains on this server.” If you use a tool like this, you can go and find out. So, two domains: that’s fine. That’s not a big deal. She’s only just changed that today, because this morning when I looked at it, it was, I think, a thousand sites. I said to her, “You better get a dedicated IP,” so it looks like Michelle gone and done that, which is fantastic because that’s gonna speed things up. Not as much though, I would add, as speeding up would happen if she compressed a lot of the images on her site.

So, there’s some basic things. People are asking, and Michelle asked this morning, “Well dedicated IP, how much is that gonna cost?” Well, with her web hosting company it’s an extra $4.00 a month. It’s really, really worth it for four bucks a month. It allows Google to come in, it’s just gonna look at your site, no other sites on that IP address.

There are just a few things you can do to really speed things up and it’s gonna help enormously.

Well see you, hopefully, in Vegas, or not, at the ProBlogger event at the Gold Coast in Queensland.

See you next week. Thanks so much. Bye.