Optimise Me

What are the fundamentals of promoting yourself on the World Wide Web? For a long time now I have been having lengthy discussion with some of my colleagues as to what search engines really want. With the new IXXUS site being launched I believe it’s the perfect opportunity to exercise our theories in a meaningful way.

I could tell you search engines want straightforward text-oriented, non-frame, non-tabled, non- graphically intensive, non-JavaScript sites. But looking at what clients are asking for and scrutinising, some of the proprietary systems out there really don’t lend themselves to any kind of optimisations ‘out of the box’.

First we need to make a distinction between two kinds of optimisation, web optimisation and search engine optimisation. Web site optimisation focuses on the websites delivery insuring visitors leave with whatever information they were after, success rate can be measured by the number of return visitors, and emails and calls received. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation focuses more on how people can find your business online by searching on the various search engines available.

The reason why I feel a distinction has to be made between the two terms is because of the incomprehension which is commonly demonstrated by a lot of online businesses. As commonsense would dictate, website optimisation should be given attention first before SEO. The reason for this is because they both lend themselves to two uniquely important goals. One is getting people to your website the other is all about keeping them there.

Website Optimisations Basics

Tags

Keeping Tags meaningful, clean and well thought out is something that will be equally rewarding for both web optimisation and search engine optimisation. A well thought out page title would be useful for search engine users by providing necessary information on a search results page. Three elements of a page title are

• Site URL
• Company Name
• Overview of the product/service on that page

Right Title Text

Ixxus.com:Partners:Alfresco Gold partner :Ixxus leading SI

Wrong Title Text

Alfresco

As you can see the right title text has the Address, Company name and unique information about that page. It’s important to know the rules and leverage them to your advantage, search engines have a limit of 65 characters for a page title, which is used as part of a search result, and so it’s important to keep that in mind as part of the planning process.

Relevant Content

As I have mentioned earlier optimising your website goes hand in hand with optimising your website for search engines. If the website optimisation is done correctly then its possible companies don’t have to spend thousands of pounds trying to promote their services on search engines. A big part of optimising your site is having the right content, converting traffic into something bankable.

Both people and search engines look for the same thing when visiting a site, simple to the point related info. In the olden days of optimisation, images and scripts were something of a No,No but now as search engines, browsers and users advance, these elements are of equal importance for a search result so don’t hold back in using them.

Separate Content from Presentation

It’s a known fact that core content on websites is frequently reused, although systems may change, content tends to be reused. One of the steps you can take to future proof your website is separating content from your presentation logic.

This is exactly what has been done with the new IXXUS architecture. This approach not only lends itself to easy content transformation for multiple methods accessing content, but it also helps with load time, caching, and SEO. For an overview of the Ixxus framework read Matt Dunn's entry.

Add Metadata

This is the 101 of web optimisation from the dawn of the Internet, adding metadata has been integral in the identification of document properties. As such the web, and some of the advanced features of the web, have grown to depend heavily on such metadata over the years. In recent years metadata has become less important than descriptions, but is still considered a good standard to adhere to within intranet and internet arenas.

Keyword Tool

Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas. Keyword Tool Tips

User friendly URL Rewrite & Single domains

Very simple, make your URL simple and logical - something that is obvious on the new IXXUS site. This does make the site search engine friendly.

Single domain - tie up your site to a single domain, allowing you to gather important information from your site stat’s.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?ixxus\.co.uk [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.ixxus.com/$1?%1 [R=301] 

Use of sitemap.xml and robots.txt

It is said that robots.txt are like a compass and sitemap.xml is like a GPS for search engine spiders. Robot.txt is typically a plain text file located at the root of the web directory, it typically would look something like this…

Search engines would want to crawl through every single directory by default, but having robots.txt you can have some control as to what will be indexed from your website.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /compiled /
Disallow: /inc/

sitemap.xml similarly just as robots.txt would guide spiders/crawlers throughout your website, sitemap.xml gives search engines a list of URL’s to promote.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.ixxus.com/blog/2009/02/ixxus-web-framework/</loc>
    <lastmod>2009-02-26</lastmod>
    <priority>1</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
</urlset>

For more information on site maps you can checkout Google Webmaster Central and Sitemaps.org. You can generate your site map here

Make fewer HTTP requests & Add an Expires header

Expire header happens to address two rules of website optimisation, namely making fewer http requests and speeding up load time. Expiry options make the sites assets cacheable; this indeed should be done with all images, possibly with scripts and style sheets too. For returning visitors the affects will reduce the load time by half. By setting the dates for those files far in the future, the default rule at the browser level will be cache until such time so assets would not be downloaded each time a visitor hits that URL.

If you are using Apache add an .htaccess file that contains the following directives to the root folder of your domain:

ExpiresActive on
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/* "access plus 1 month"

Gzip components

This is an essential piece of functionality to enable; it will allow you to compress files before you send them to the client’s browser; this will improve overall experience of the end user.

<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>

Using firebug or Charles you are able to view requests and responses with the current encoding.

Example Request:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host    www.ixxus.com
User-Agent    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept    text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language    en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding    gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset    ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

Example Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:38:52 GMT
Cache-Control: public
Last-Modified: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:27:45 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Date: Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:38:52 GMT
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Content-Length: 131

In conclusion to this first part of our basic optimisation segment I would say a little bit of effort on your end to make sure all the necessary elements are tied up nicely, will ensure that the world out there can browse your site graciously and efficiently. Remember - one of the key challenges of being online is being found,;being found and being useful is all a matter of common sense (both people and search engines want the same thing) good clean honest information.

In my next segment I will talk about advanced optimisation of Assets (Images, Scripts, and Styles)