How fast your webpages load has a big impact on both your viewer’s experience and your search engine rankings. People tend to view fast loading websites as more professional, and search engines give faster loading websites more “points” than slow loading sites. Here are a few tips to optimize your site to load faster:

Use Gzip Compression

Gzip compression allows you to compress HTTP data on your server and send it to the user’s browser, which will then decompress the data and display it on their side. This can make quite a big difference. If you take a 17k HTML file and Gzip it, you’ll get a 6.8k file back. Sending the compressed file will take less than half the time of the uncompressed file. Not every browser supports Gzip compression. Some browsers, such as Internet Explorer 4, can’t handle compressed JavaScript code. That said, if you enable HTTP compression just for browsers with Gzip capability, you will drastically speed up your load time for a lot of your visitors.

Use Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to store all the stylistic elements of your website in one file. That file needs to be downloaded only once, no matter how many pages on your site any given viewer sees. For example, let’s say someone comes to your blog ten times a month and looks at an average of two pages each time; therefore, they are loading a page from your site twenty times a month. If your fonts and page styling were stored in the page, they would have to load that every time. If you put it all in a .css file, however, they would only need to load that once. This will optimize your page load times, as well as save you bandwidth.

Use Page Caching

Caching allows you to turn PHP (or other web app code) into HTML files for faster loading. Let’s say you run a WordPress website. Typically, when someone comes to your site, this is what happens. First, they send a REQUEST for a file to your server. Your server then goes to its PHP engine to execute your index.php file, which will put together your index file based on all the different code in your WordPress set-up. Once the page is put together, it’ll serve up the HTML to your end user. The browser turns the HTML into the webpage that the end user sees. This whole process is quite processor intensive and is slow from a technical perspective.

What caching does instead is convert all your files into HTML so that it can be served up to users in HTML form without having to go through the page construction process every single time. A smart caching engine will be able to serve up HTML files only when that’s what they would see anyway. If what the user would see with the PHP version is different, the caching engine will go through the PHP engine instead of serving up an HTML file.

These are three extremely effective ways of speeding up your webpage load times. Enable Gzip compression, use external CSS files, and install some kind of page caching. These three combined can drastically decrease your average load time.

Your bounce rate measures the number of people who come to your blog and don’t visit any other post or page on your blog. Naturally, the higher the bounce rate, the less exposure you are getting as the visitors see less of your content.

Also, bounce rate is starting to play more and more of a role in search engine optimization (SEO). Google is starting to pay less and less attention to links and more attention to on-page metrics. They can get these metrics from the Google Toolbar, Chrome and Google Analytics.

In short, having a lower bounce rate means you will have more satisfied readers, as well as a higher chance of ranking well in search engines. Here’s how to improve your bounce rate.

Check All Browsers

Check for browser compatibility on all browsers. If your website doesn’t look right in one browser, chances are all users of that browser will leave your site. Even if the browser only has 15 percent penetration, you are still losing 15 percent of your traffic. Make sure to check all the major and even smaller browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. Also check how your site looks on a smartphone.

Cluster Your Information

Instead of having just one piece of stand-alone content, try to publish your content in groups.

For example, if you own an origami website, don’t make just one page of content around how to make a T-Rex dinosaur. Make a cluster of origami content around how to make all kinds of dinosaurs. Also try to give a clear next step at the end of every page or post, giving visitors further reading.

Segment Your Traffic

Not everyone coming to your website is looking for the same thing. If someone came from a search engine, chances are they are looking for the answer to a very specific query. On the other hand, someone from a banner ad campaign may be in more of a browsing mood.

Different kinds of traffic should land on different kinds of pages. Different keyword traffic should land on different pages. Make sure you are serving exactly the right kind of pages to users who are most likely to want to see those pages.

Test Your Above the Fold

The things that show up above the fold on your website will have a bigger effect than just about anything else you can do from a content perspective.

Test different kinds of headlines to see what gets the lowest bounce rate. Try different headers. Switching out your old header for a new header can have a massive positive or negative effect on your site-wide bounce rate. Test different headers to see what gets the best results.

These are a few things you can do to immediately improve your bounce rate. A lower bounce rate may not immediately put cash in your bank account, but is essential to the long-term health of your business.

A lot of beginning web marketers will launch websites without any tracking on them. This is all right in the very beginning stages of launching a website, but the moment you decide that the website is more than a hobby and is something you actually want to make money from, you should install tracking right away.

Determining How Your Website is Performing

If you don’t track even the fundamental things, such as how much traffic your website is getting, how many people are coming back to your website after leaving, and other basic metrics, you will have no idea how your website is doing.

If your website is starting to get serious traffic, that means an opportunity to make money. If you don’t have tracking installed, you won’t know when that occurs. In addition to the basics, there are a lot of other benefits of tracking some of the more advanced metrics.

Ranking Well in Search Engines Using Metrics

With the Panda update, Google has publicly stated that they are using visitor metrics much more heavily now in their ranking algorithms.

That means that pages where visitors stay longer will tend to rank higher. Pages where users click and then never come back to Google also rank higher, as that probably means they found the answer to their question on your website. Pages which users don’t bounce from and instead go to other pages on your site will also rank higher.

These are just a fraction of the metrics Google is now considering in their ranking algorithm. If you want your website to rank, you need to be consistently monitoring things such as return rate, bounce rate and exit rate to improve them over time.

Tracking Performance to Improve Cash Flow

Some metrics may not immediately improve your bottom line; however, improvements in other metrics can immediately improve your cash flow. For example, determine what your current visitor to email sign-up rate and your email to conversion rate. By tracking these two metrics, you can immediately add more cash to your bottom line. More importantly, any improvements you make to these metrics will last over time, paying off for months and years.

Improving the Non-Tangibles of Your Business

How useful are people finding your website, how many people feel as though your site is resourceful enough that they return, and how many people post items from your site to their Facebook status are all metrics that won’t necessarily add to your bottom line right away. However, they will result in more links, more visitors and more community goodwill which, in the long run, will turn into more visitors and more cash.

These are some of the many reasons you should be tracking the performance of your website. Without good tracking, you are essentially visionless. By tracking and measuring your metrics, you will be able to refine and improve your website over time.

The whole process of getting your website to the top of Google can be broken down into a number of steps that when followed, can place your site right up there at the top. The key is to consistently execute these steps until you get results. Here is how to create this process for you and your website.

Step 1: Identify a Reasonable Goal

When you are setting search engine optimization (SEO) goals, set both ambitious goals and goals that are achievable in weeks. These goals will take the form of keywords. You probably can’t expect to rank in the top three for your main keyword within six months. Although it is possible, don’t build your business based on that expectation. On the other hand, it is very reasonable to aim for ranking in a few weeks for long tail keywords. Start your quest for rankings with a main keyword to target in the long run and several less competitive keywords to rank for in the short run.

Step 2: Set a Content Goal

The content goal needs to come in the form of X pieces of content per Y amount of time. For example:

Goal: 3 Blog posts a week

Goal: 100 new products a month (ecommerce site)

Goal: 1 Video blog post a week

and so on and so forth. Remember that you are going to need to be able to follow this schedule for a few months. Be ambitious, but not so ambitious that you risk falling giving up. While it is possible to rank a website of just static content, Google does place a very strong emphasis and preference on websites that are regularly updated with new content.

Step 3: Set a Backlink Goal

Backlinks are the magic that makes an SEO campaign work. Choose one or two backlink strategies that you can execute regularly. Then create a schedule for when you will do the work. For example, if your strategy is to comment on ten blogs a week, then choose which days you will do your commenting. If your strategy is to do four guest blog posts a month, then you may have to contact five to ten blogs a week to make that happen. Again, schedule when you will do that on a weekly basis. The secret to rankings isn’t getting a bunch of backlinks all at once, but consistently increasing your backlinks over time.

If you follow these three steps and consistently add both content and backlinks to that content, you will find that you will very quickly start ranking for your lesser competition keywords. In a few months, you will find even higher competition keywords getting ranked, and eventually, you will even rank for your main keywords.

Websites with a lot of duplicate content get penalized by search engines. After all, their goal is to find unique content, not content that is the same throughout the internet, or even the same throughout your website. Many webmasters will unknowingly have a lot of duplicate content on their website, often because of simple technical mistakes. Here is how to avoid duplicate content.

Where Does Duplicate Content Come From?

Perhaps the most common source of duplicate content is from archive-type pages. For example, if you run a blog, the main content is in your posts. But you also have your category pages and your archive pages. Each of your category pages has a 200-word snippet from the article as a teaser for viewers to see.

Unfortunately, that means a single page of your category pages has as much as 1500 words of duplicate content, copied straight from your articles. The same is true of your archive pages. And any given blog may have dozens of pages of category and archive pages. Less common sources of duplicate content include hiring unscrupulous outsourcers who copy and paste other people’s work, along with webmasters who republish other people’s articles with the original author’s permission (legal, but not good from a search engine optimization [SEO] perspective.) So how do you prevent duplicate content?

Learn to Use Your Meta Robots or Robots.txt

Your meta robots tag allows you to specify on a certain page whether you want the page indexed or not. If your page contains duplicate content, just tell the search engines not to index it. Robots.txt resides on your top level directory and tells the search engines which pages it can and can’t index. Basically, meta works on a single page and robots.txt directs the whole site. Learn to use both if you often need to block search engines out of certain pages. Learning to use meta robots and robots.txt is especially important if you are using HTML or PHP to build your site, rather than WordPress.

Using WordPress Plug-Ins

If you are using WordPress, a lot of the duplicate content issues can be remedied through plug-ins. Most of the SEO plug-ins will handle the major duplicate content issues for you. Make sure you get one that allows you to “noindex” your category and archive pages, as well as automatically make all your links canonical.

Scan All Content with Copyscape

If you regularly outsource content, get in the habit of scanning your content with Copyscape. Copyscape will scan the internet for copies of your content and report back to you if they have found any matches, along with how close the match was. Though you will seldom run into an issue with outsourcers copying content outright, if it does happen it could ruin your entire website; therefore, it doesn’t hurt to be careful.

Duplicate content is preventable. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to noindex the right pages and scan your content with Copyscape. Get in the habit of performing these two procedures and you will protect your rankings in the long run.