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joi, 26 septembrie 2013

Pins You'll Love

Hi Hari,

Here's what we picked out for you this week. We hope you find something you like!

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Quick and Easy Crockpot Recipes

Jennifer Haber Fishkind

Want...Need...Love!

Nora Statement Necklace

Sief H

style etc

Open Front Jacquard Sweater

Hey Mercedes

forever

gluten free pumpkin oatmeal cookies

Jill Craig-Lauzon

Falloween

Recipe: Blueberry, Lavender and White Chocolate Cake

synapse *

eye candy

Grace Dress in Black Lace | Awesome Selection of Chic Fashion ...

Kathleen Hoover

Absolutely Love It

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street looks

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agnès b. official

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Home Decor Inspiration

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blackpoolbird

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Crochet & Knitting - Appliques/ Motifs (free)

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KENZO Loves Fashion Week

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KENZO

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Everything You Want to Share, in One Place:

Featured

Everything You Want to Share, in One Place:

Whether it's with an infographic or a White Board video, we're always looking for new ways to highlight the work President Obama is doing on behalf of the American people in a way that's interesting and easy to understand.

Now we've put all of our favorite content in one easy-to-navigate page: White House Shareables. You can sort by the issues important to you, or the type of content you'd like to see.

Check out the page -- and get sharing.

Improving Search Rank by Optimizing Your Time to First Byte

Posted: 25 Sep 2013 04:18 PM PDT

Posted by Zoompf

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Back in August, Zoompf published newly uncovered research findings examining the effect of web performance on Google's search rankings. Working with Matt Peters from Moz, we tested the performance of over 100,000 websites returned in the search results for 2000 different search queries. In that study, we found a clear correlation between a faster time to first byte (TTFB) and a higher search engine rank. While it could not be outright proven that decreasing TTFB directly caused an increasing search rank, there was enough of a correlation to at least warrant some further discussion of the topic.

The TTFB metric captures how long it takes your browser to receive the first byte of a response from a web server when you request a particular website URL. In the graph captured below from our research results, you can see websites with a faster TTFB in general ranked more highly than websites with a slower one.

We found this to be true not only for general searches with one or two keywords, but also for "long tail" searches of four or five keywords. Clearly this data showed an interesting trend that we wanted to explore further. If you haven't already checked out our prior article on Moz, we recommend you check it out now, as it provides useful background for this post: How Website Speed Actually Impacts Search Ranking.

In this article, we continue exploring the concept of Time to First Byte (TTFB), providing an overview of what TTFB is and steps you can take to improve this metric and (hopefully) improve your search ranking.

What affects TTFB?

The TTFB metric is affected by 3 components:

The time it takes for your request to propagate through the network to the web server
The time it takes for the web server to process the request and generate the response
The time it takes for the response to propagate back through the network to your browser.

To improve TTFB, you must decrease the amount of time for each of these components. To know where to start, you first need to know how to measure TTFB.

Measuring TTFB

While there are a number of tools to measure TTFB, we're partial to an open source tool called WebPageTest.

Using WebPageTest is a great way to see where your site performance stands, and whether you even need to apply energy to optimizing your TTFB metric. To use, simply visit http://webpagetest.org, select a location that best fits your user profile, and run a test against your site. In about 30 seconds, WebPageTest will return you a "waterfall" chart showing all the resources your web page loads, with detailed measurements (including TTFB) on the response times of each.

If you look at the very first line of the waterfall chart, the "green" part of the line shows you your "Time to First Byte" for your root HTML page. You don't want to see a chart that looks like this:

In the above example, a full six seconds is getting devoted to the TTFB of the root page! Ideally this should be under 500 ms.

So if you do have a "slow" TTFB, the next step is to determine what is making it slow and what you can do about it. But before we dive into that, we need to take a brief aside to talk about "Latency."

Latency

Latency is a commonly misunderstood concept. Latency is the amount of time it takes to transmit a single piece of data from one location to another. A common misunderstanding is that if you have a fast internet connection, you should always have low latency.

A fast internet connection is only part of the story: the time it takes to load a page is not just dictated by how fast your connection is, but also how FAR that page is from your browser. The best analogy is to think of your internet connection as a pipe. The higher your connection bandwidth (aka "speed"), the fatter the pipe is. The fatter the pipe, the more data that can be downloaded in parallel. While this is helpful for overall throughput of data, you still have a minimum "distance" that needs to be covered by each specific connection your browser makes.

The figure below helps demonstrate the differences between bandwidth and latency.

As you can see above, the same JPG still has to travel the same "distance" in both the higher and lower bandwidth scenarios, where "distance" is defined by two primary of factors:

The physical distance from A to B. (For example, a user in Atlanta hitting a server in Sydney.)
The number of "hops" between A and B, since internet traffic redirects through an increasing number of routers and switches the further it has to travel.

So while higher bandwidth is most definitely beneficial for overall throughput, you still have to travel the initial "distance" of the connection to load your page, and that's where latency comes in.

So how do you measure your latency?

Measuring latency and processing time

The best tool to separate latency from server processing time is surprisingly accessible: ping.

The ping tool is pre-installed by default on most Windows, Mac and Linux systems. What ping does is send a very small packet of information over the internet to your destination URL, measuring the amount of time it takes for that information to get there and back. Ping uses virtually no processing overhead on the server side, so measuring your ping response times gives you a good feel for the latency component of TTFB.

In this simple example I measure my ping time between my home computer in Roswell, GA and a nearby server at www.cs.gatech.edu in Atlanta, GA. You can see a screenshot of the ping command below:

Ping continued to test the average response time of the server, and summarized an average response time of 15.8 milliseconds. Ideally you want your ping times to be under 100ms, so this is a good result. (but admittedly the distance traveled here is very small, more about that later).

By subtracting the ping time from your overall TTFB time, you can then break out the network latency components (TTFB parts 1 and 3) from the server back-end processing component (part 2) to properly focus your optimization efforts.

Grading yourself

From the research shown earlier, we found that websites with the top search rankings had TTFB as low as 350 ms, with the higher ranking sites pushing up to 650 ms. We recommend a total TTFB of 500ms or less.

Of that 500ms, a roundtrip network latency of no more than 100ms is recommended. If you have a large number of users coming from another continent, network latency may be as high as 200ms, but if that traffic is important to you, there are additional measures you can take to help here which we'll get to shortly.

To summarize, your ideal targets for your initial HTML page load should be:

Time to First Byte of 500 ms or less
Roundtrip network latency of 100 ms or less
Back-end processing of 400 ms or less

So if your numbers are higher than this, what can you do about it?

Improving latency with CDNs

The solution to improving latency is pretty simple: Reduce the "distance" between your content and your visitors. If your servers are in Atlanta, but your users are in Sydney, you don't want your users to request content half way around the world. Instead, you want to move that content as close to your users as possible.

Fortunately, there's an easy way to do this: move your static content into a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs automatically replicate your content to multiple locations around the world, geographically closer to your users. So now if you publish content in Atlanta, it will automatically copy to a server in Syndey from which your Australian users will download it. As you can see in the diagram below, CDNs make a considerable difference in reducing the distance of your user requests, and hence reduce the latency component of TTFB:

To impact TTFB, make sure the CDN you choose can cache the static HTML of your website homepage, and not just dependent resources like images, javascript and CSS, since that is the initial resource the google bot will request and measure TTFB.

There are a number of great CDNs out there including Akamai, Amazon Cloudfront, Cloudflare, and many more.

Optimizing back-end infrastructure performance

The second factor in TTFB is the amount of time the server spends processing the request and generating the response. Essentially the back-end processing time is the performance of all the other "stuff" that makes up your website:

The operating system and computer hardware which runs your website and how it is configured
The application code that's running on that hardware (like your CMS) as well as how it is configured
Any database queries that the application makes to generate the page, how many queries it makes, the amount of data that is returned, and the configuration of the database

How to optimize the back-end of a website is a huge topic that would (and does) fill several books. I can hardly scratch the surface in this blog post. However, there are a few areas specific to TTFB that I will mention that you should investigate.

A good starting point is to make sure that you have the needed equipment to run your website. If possible, you should skip any form of "shared hosting" for your website. What we mean by shared hosting is utilizing a platform where your site shares the same server resources as other sites from other companies. While cheaper, shared hosting passes on considerable risk to your own website as your server processing speed is now at the mercy of the load and performance of other, unrelated websites. To best protect your server processing assets, insist on using dedicated hosting resources from your cloud provider.

Also, be wary of virtual or "on-demand" hosting systems. These systems will suspend or pause your virtual server if you have not received traffic for a certain period of time. Then, when a new user accesses your site, they will initiate a "resume" activity to spin that server back up for processing. Depending on the provider, this initial resume could take 10 or more seconds to complete. If that first user is the Google search bot, your TTFB metric from that request could be truly awful.

Optimize back-end software performance

Check the configuration of your application or CMS. Are there any features or logging settings that can be disabled? Is it in a "debugging mode?" You want to get rid of nonessential operations that are happening to improve how quickly the site can respond to a request.

If your application or CMS is using an interpreted language like PHP or Ruby, you should investigate ways to decrease execution time. Interpreted languages have a step to convert them into machine understandable code which what is actually executed by the server. Ideally you want the server to do this conversion once, instead of with each incoming request. This is often called "compiling" or "op-code caching" though those names can vary depending on the underline technology. For example, with PHP you can use software like APC to speed up execution. A more extreme example would be Hip Hop, a compiler created and used by Facebook that converts PHP into C code for faster execution.

When possible, utilizing server-side caching is a great way to generate dynamic pages quickly. If your page is loading content that changes infrequently, utilizing a local cache to return those resources is a highly effective way in improving the performance of your page load time.

Effective caching can be done at different levels by different tools and are highly dependent on the technology you are using for the back-end of your website. Some caching software only cache one kind of data, while others do caching at multiple levels. For example, W3 Total Cache is a WordPress plug-in that does both database query caching as well as page caching. Batcache is a WordPress plug-in created by Automattic that does whole page caching. Memcached is a great general object cache that can be used for pretty much anything, but requires more development setup. Regardless of what technology you use, finding ways to reduce the amount of work needed to create the page by reusing previously created fragments can be a big win.

As with any software changes you'd make, make sure to continually test the impact to your TTFB as you incrementally make each change. You can also use Zoompf's free performance report to identify back-end issues which are effecting performance, such as not using chunked encoding and much more.

Conclusions

As we discussed, TTFB has 3 components: the time it takes for your request to propagate to the web server; the time it takes for the web server to process the request and generate the response; and the time it takes for the response to propagate back to your browser. Latency captures the first and third components of TTFB, and can be measured effectively through tools like WebPageTest and ping. Server processing time is simply the overall TTFB time minus the latency.

We recommend a TTFB time of 500 ms or less. Of that TTFB, no more than 100 ms should be spent on network latency, and no more than 400 ms on back-end processing.

You can improve your latency by moving your content geographically closer to your visitors. A CDN is a great way to accomplish this as long as it can be used to serve your dynamic base HTML page. You can improve the performance of the back-end of your website in a number of ways, usually through better server configuration and caching expensive operations like database calls and code execution that occur when generating the content. We provide a free web performance scanner that can help you identify the root causes of slow TTFB, as well as other performance-impacting areas of your website code, at http://zoompf.com/free.

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When and how to refresh your web content

Posted: 25 Sep 2013 06:35 AM PDT

We're going through the process of rebuilding our website just now, with the launch scheduled soon. My part in this process has been to completely rewrite our copy, which is an exercise I've been through with several clients recently as well. I wrote the current SEOptimise website copy back in 2011. Two years ago doesn't seem very long, but it's abundantly clear from reading the existing copy that we've come a long way since it was written, and that I've come a long way as a copywriter since then too – my writing has matured significantly as I've worked on so many different clients and picked up new copywriting tricks. I'm proud of the new copy – which you'll see when the site launches – and feel it reflects the fact that SEOptimise has properly grown up.

So how is this relevant to you? Well, I've learnt a lot in the process of rewriting the copy – not least the importance of regularly reviewing and refreshing your content and not simply putting it online and forgetting about it. In this post, I'd like to share some insights and tips to help you make sure your on-site content continues to be fresh, relevant and effective at achieving your goals.

I'm going to cover the following:
• How do you know when your content needs refreshing?
• What to consider when you rewrite your copy
• How to write effective web copy
• Refreshing your meta data

How do you know when your content needs refreshing?

If websites didn’t refresh their content once in a while, Twitter would still look like this:

Hard to believe when you look at it now, isn’t it?

But when is it time to change? It’s time to ask yourself some questions.

Does your website generate conversions? Do people share it and interact with it? Do you get a steady stream of traffic to all your content, or does it all go to the homepage or blog? If your content isn't performing well, it's probably time for a refresh.

Have an objective read of the copy on your website and answer the following questions:

• How long ago was it written?
• Does it still reflect where your brand is today?
• Is it still relevant, or has the marketplace changed?
• Does it conform to web writing best practice – using short, skimmable paragraphs, headings and bullet points where appropriate?
• Is there too much copy – or too little?
• Is it consistent throughout the site – does it read as though it was written by one person or many?
• Does it encourage users to take the actions you want them to take?

Your honest answers to these questions should help you identify copy that could do with being rewritten.

You should also look at the other kinds of content on your site:

• How are the images on your site looking? Are there enough of them? Are there opportunities for adding images to support the copy? You know what they say – a picture speaks a thousand words.
• What other content types do you have? Is there much variety? Have you thought about adding some videos, podcasts or reviews to introduce new content types to your site?
• Do you have any content that could be presented in a more engaging format? For instance, a long page of copy that could be better presented as a video, or a dry report full of statistics that would be easier to digest in a visual format, as an infographic?

What to consider when you rewrite your copy

So how do you go about refreshing the content you already have? Here are some things to think about to get you started.

Site architecture
If your site structure is changing along with the refresh, you'll need to plan out what copy you need for each page, and where each page sits within the hierarchy. This will help you when it comes to cross-referencing and crosslinking between pages, as well as planning your workload or writing briefs for your copywriter. Even if you're not planning a major overhaul of your site architecture, it's still worth considering whether you need any extra pages creating, or existing pages combining, in order to structure your content logically and deliver your message effectively and in a user-friendly manner.

Language and tone
What tone are you aiming for, and what language will you use to create it? Write a list of words and phrases that reflect your brand – how you describe your services, USPs, values, and so on. Decide whether you're going to use first person or third person. First person ("we are a digital marketing agency") is friendlier and more direct, while third person (for instance, "SEOptimise is a digital marketing agency") is arguably more distant, and coldly business-like. Which you go for may depend to an extent on the nature of your business and who your target audience is, as well as the need to differentiate from competitors – so have a think about who your readers will be and ensure that your copy is appropriate to them.

Length
How much copy do you need for each page? SEO best practice dictates a minimum of 300 words, but conveying your message effectively is still the single most important consideration. Too much copy will put readers off, but not enough and you risk not being valued by Google as well as providing insufficient information for readers, so you need to strike a balance.

Many websites have virtually no copy on their homepages, for instance, which is terrible for SEO. Plenty of clients over the years, on having this pointed out to them, have declined to add more copy on design grounds. But adding copy to a homepage doesn't have to impact the design; it's perfectly possible to add subtle copy further down the page, with a couple of lines visible and an 'expand' or 'read more' button that then shows a longer paragraph. This is a good compromise, and you can see it in action in the screenshot below, which comes from towards the bottom of the Notonthehighstreet homepage.

Structure and calls to action
Think about how you'll structure the copy on each page. To start with, jot down your site plan and make a note of what each page is trying to achieve. What will a conversion be from this page? Websites are there to fulfil a purpose, and whether you're an e-commerce site or not, you'll still need to define conversions in order to assess how well your website is performing.

Examples of conversions include:
• Download a brochure
• Buy a product
• Remain on a page for a particular length of time
• Watch a video
• Send an enquiry
• Register for an event
• Sign up to a mailing list

Does your web content guide users to take these actions? If not, you should encourage readers to do what you want them to do by adding calls to action into your copy.

Internal links
I mentioned internal links in the section above on site architecture. It's good to include these contextually in the copy, as this gives users immediate access to other relevant information at the point at which they may want to see it. Other examples of good ways of including internal links – which also help strengthen your site architecture – are to have lists of 'related posts' at the end of a blog post, or a 'you may also be interested in' section for related products on a product page.

Tip: ask the team
Your website should reflect your company values. One way of ensuring that it does is to seek the opinions of your colleagues. When I first started thinking about the new SEOptimise copy I asked every member of the SEOptimise team to email me three words they would use to describe SEOptimise. I put all the words people sent me into a spreadsheet, and ordered them by the number of times people used each word. Then I worked those words into our copy. The result? Website copy that actually reflects who we are as both a company and individuals.

How to write effective web copy

When you're writing for the web, remember that most readers scan through web pages rather than reading them in detail. This means that it should be easy for them to get the gist of your message (for example, the benefits of a product) without having to read it properly. Here's how to achieve this.

• Paragraphs: keep paragraphs short. No walls of text!
• Structure: use the 'inverted pyramid' structure of a press release. Start with the most important information first and then include progressively less important details.
• Headings: use a single H1 for the title, including a keyword if it reads naturally to do so, and use H2 tags for subheadings throughout the copy to help break up the text.
• Bullet points: where appropriate, information can be presented in bullet point format (as I'm doing here). Bullet points break up text and make some kinds of information easier to read.
• Bold: you can highlight important words or phrases in bold to make them stand out.
• Hyperlinks: as mentioned above, include links to relevant pages, both internal and external, where appropriate. Have internal links open in the same window and external links in a new window.
• Images and other media: photos, drawings, videos, infographics, graphs, maps – all these and more can be used to support the copy on a page, and will add variety and visually enhance the page, improving its readability.

Don't forget your meta data

When you rewrite your website copy, don't forget to revisit your meta data (your title tags and meta descriptions) as well. Your meta data is a part of your copy and it's just as important to ensure that it remains up-to-date, in keeping with the copy on your website in terms of language and message, and using the most relevant keywords. Strong brands present a uniform message across all areas. The top keywords can change, so it's always a good idea to monitor these on a regular basis – say, once a quarter – to make sure you're still targeting the best ones.

Here are a few tips:

• Conduct some keyword research for your top keywords and make sure you're not missing any opportunities.
• Ensure that the keywords in the meta data for each page are relevant to that page and not leading readers to expect something different.
• Ensure that the language and message in your meta data reflects what's on the page.
• Ensure that all title tags and meta descriptions are within the character limit (70 and 160 characters respectively) to ensure they don't get cut off in the search results.
• Ensure that calls to action and USPs are included to entice users onto the page.

You'll find further advice on copywriting for meta data in my post, Copywriting tricks to turbocharge your meta data for conversions.

Do you need help refreshing your website content? We can help! Drop me a line at rachel@seoptimise.com or on Twitter @RachelsWritings.

Seth's Blog : Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Stories.

Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. Stories.

The most common style of public speaking, one that’s often used by politicians and is surprisingly common among investment pitches, is based on sentences. At the end of each sentence, the voice goes up a bit, the speaker pauses, as if waiting for an applause line.

I’ve even seen corporate CEOs be trained to do this, mostly because they lack the guts to trust themselves and their audience. It's my least favorite part of the Techstars pitch training, in fact.

The sentence is not a natural building block of public speaking, and it’s tiring, for both the speaker and the audience. It’s hard to maintain any sort of energy in either direction.

Building. A. Speech. Around. Words. Is. Even. More. Difficult.

The real opportunity is in speaking in paragraphs, or even better, in stories. The storyteller naturally engages our attention, and she matches her emphasis and cadence to the rhythm of the story.

Here’s how to know if you’re on the right track: if you stop a story in the middle, the audience will insist you finish it.

Isn’t that what you want?