By now, most of us that are involved in SEO to any reasonable level should know that the speed of a site is having an effect on a site’s rankings. Whether it’s the speed of the server, more streamlined code or the use of optimised images it all matters and Google has just confirmed this to us once again by incorporating site speed into Google Analytics.

If releasing a page load analysis tool and adding a sub-section dedicated to site speed within Webmaster Tools wasn’t enough, this is surely a step to make any good SEO pay attention and start looking at everything they can to make a site run as fast and effectively as possible.

In many ways it comes down to user experience. It makes sense that Google rewards sites that provide the best user experience possible and can be measured partly through the speed of a site.

A fast-loading site suggests that the site owner has spent money on a good hosting account or server, has optimised all images and only included them where necessary and has optimised their code to run as streamlined as possible in order to give their visitors what they want quickly and effectively.

Not only that but it also benefits you directly in the way of reducing disk space on your hosting account as well as bandwidth costs which, depending on your host, can be costly if you use more of your allocated ‘allowance’.

Site speed is only available in the new Beta version of Google Analytics and we’re seeing some results trickling in.

So if everything else wasn’t enough to make you want to speed up your site, now is the perfect time to do what you can to help your site perform better within the search engines as well as give your current visitors the best user experience possible while they’re on your site and get the most out of each and every hit.

Google make hundreds of changes to their search ranking algorithm each year and this year is no exception – over 500 changes were made to help improve the way Google delivers results to the end user.

In line with Google’s efforts to keep the search results fresh and current, I thought I’d list some of the most recent changes Google has made to the search results to improve the quality even further.

In brief, here are 5 of the changes Google has made to the search results over the last couple of weeks that affect the vast majority of us:

Fresher Search Results

Affecting over 35% of all search queries, Google have made changes to place emphasis on more resent content. This would affect news items, blogs and also recently updated pages so now it’s more important than ever to keep your website current and update it regularly.

Date-Restricted Search

As a result in part of the above changes to place emphasis on fresh content, date-restricted search – whereby a user selects a date range to display results from – Google have made changes to make their search results for these dates more consistently accurate.

Official Page Detection

We know that Google places a lot of emphasis on brands to determine which site should be displayed for a particular brand search, such as the actual home page for a particular company, club or brand name. Google has announced that this has now been refined to make their judgement more accurate and consistent.

More Comprehensive Search Results

Snippets that appear within the search results have been made more comprehensive as the crawlers begin to understand page structure better. Google are now able to include more page content and less information from headers and/or menu systems allowing us to see more relevant information in the search results to help us make a better decision on whether we want to visit each particular site.

Better Page Titles

Looking at a number of signals when generating a page title for the search results, Google is now placing places less emphasis on duplicated anchor text in links pointing to a particular page. The result of this is being able to display titles that are more specific to the content of the page itself.

SEO is an excellent method of improving your website’s visibility online and ultimately generating traffic. However, organic traffic has some drawbacks:

• You can’t easily test landing pages, headlines, and templates
• You can’t get rapid feedback
• You don’t get traffic on certain keywords until you rank for the terms

This is where PPC campaigns can help out your SEO by allowing you to conduct testing which heralds instant feedback.

Please see below my top 3 ways a PPC account can help you gather the data you need to make the right SEO decisions.

Testing Home Pages

If you’re thinking about changing your homepage or making some adjustments to the existing one with the aim of increasing your site’s performance, one of the first things you’d want to do after designing the new page would be to test it to check it is actually an improvement on the old one.

Unfortunately, you can’t simply upload a few homepages and tell the search engines to rotate which one the traffic goes too. You also don’t want all of these homepages indexed as that can cause issues with your existing rankings.

Never fear as there is a solution; simply put your new homepage designs in their own folder and use robot.txt file on them to disallow any crawling by the search engines to prevent these pages being indexed and affecting your existing SEO rankings.

Then send your desired traffic to these pages via PPC and monitor the results via analytics or alike.

Testing Title Tags

Webpage title tags serve two major purposes:

• Tell a search engine what your page is about
• Serve as a headline on the search engine result pages

What your headline says when displayed on the SERPs is the difference between your page gaining the click or not.

The main goal of a PPC adverts headline is to showcase your product/service, offering and drawing attention to itself with the ultimate aim of gaining the click. Therefore the overall goals of an organic title tag and a PPC adverts headline are very similar.

Most page titles are 55 – 65 characters and a PPC adverts headline, when shown above the search results with extended headlines activated, can be up to 60 characters which means you can test a variety of page titles via PPC to determine which have the best click through rate before you place them on your website. This is a really simple tip but can make a big difference to the amount of traffic your organic listing generates.

Test New Keywords

If you’re thinking of adding some new keywords to optimise for organically but are not sure if they are the right keywords for you site or if the return they’ll bring will warrant the investment of optimising for them, then PPC is a great way of finding out if they will work for your site without having to update your onsite and offsite SEO.

By setting up ad groups for your potential new keywords and then monitoring your sites analytics, you can gain a valuable insight into whether these keywords will be worth targeting via an organic campaign.

As Google announced yesterday that they have launched the new Google+ Business Pages, I thought I’d run through the reasons I like the new pages…or should that be why I ‘plus one’ the new pages…

+1 They exist!

The first plus point is simply the fact that business pages are available on Google+ now. If you’re wondering why there is so much fuss at the moment about these business pages, it’s because Google didn’t allow businesses to create profiles, they could only be personal accounts when Plus launched.

+2 Reducing noise

I get the feeling that Google have taken a back seat and listened to user feedback on Facebook and Twitter and tried to take the best of both worlds to create the ideal scenario for businesses on social networks. Facebook users would complain that they ‘liked’ a business page but then ‘unliked’ them after feeling that their news feeds were full of too many posts from that business. A recent study found that 36% of their respondents “unliked a brand because they felt that they heard from them too often.” With Google+ Business Pages, users are able to ‘plus one’ (a sort of alternative to Facebook ‘likes’) a business page without ‘following’ (adding to circles) the page. An effective way to allow business pages build up credibility without users having to make too much of a commitment and getting annoyed.

+3 Less spamming

Following on from the idea that Google have picked the best bits of Twitter and Facebook – it seems that Google want to reduce spamming techniques and create a more credible network. On Twitter, businesses can follow as many users as they like in the hope that those users will follow them back, which is a spamming ‘technique’ used too often. On Facebook, businesses aren’t allowed to ‘add’ or ‘follow’ their fans, meaning they can’t see the status updates of those people. I think Google+ have got it pretty right with their rules – a business can follow a personal user, but only those who have followed their business first. A nice way for users to verify that they’re happy for a business to follow them I feel, and obviously beneficial for the business to be able to see what their fans are talking about.

+4 Easy access

By introducing ‘Direct Connect’ Google will now return a business page in the search results if someone searches for a business name with a + symbol before e.g. “+pepsi”. A neat feature that allows users to jump to business pages without having to go into Google Plus first, and perhaps a more useful purpose of the + sign function in search. However to make sure your page does show in Direct Connect, you have to link your website to your page which is fairly straight forward and Google have provided simple instructions.

+5 Verified pages

Many businesses got caught out with Twitter, in not claiming their username quick enough and losing it. Although Twitter now offer a way to claim your username back, it’s not the smoothest of processes in my opinion. At the moment anyone can make a business page on Google+ but they won’t be able to add icons or badges, or appear in Direct Connect until the page has been linked to the right website. My guess is that the initial users of Google+ are savvy enough to work out whether the business page is real or not, and by the time the less savvy users move over from Facebook (will this really happen?) Google will have proper verification settings in place.

Of course, there are many negative points about the new business pages, but I thought I’d give Google a break, after all, they are saying goodbye to their previous social network… Buzz who?

Are you on Google+? Check out our Creare Communications page and let us know your thoughts on the new business pages.

When it comes to creating your homepage, whether you get it professionally developed or are doing it yourself, it’s easy to focus on what you want from a website and what you want to put across to your visitors, speaking of the content and its message specifically.

Unfortunately, this message doesn’t always match up to the questions that your visitors need answering when they first land on your site. Sometimes you need to take a step back from the message you want to put across and think about things a little more the way your visitors would see it.

More specifically, answer those age-old questions that date back way before the internet arrived. The 5 W’s (and a H); Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

Addressing these questions on your homepage will ensure that the majority of your visitors’ questions will be answered and – if done in the right way – should also give them trust in your website and give them more reason to get in touch, place an order or – at the very least – stick around longer to view more of your site and what you offer or have to say.

Think of it as your first meeting with a prospective client. You want this to be as positive and effective as possible while keeping the client interested and answering their most common and foremost questions quickly.

Once that’s out of the way you can start selling to them by answering other questions or working your own message on what’s important into the main message.

Your website should be your online sales tool and (again, if done right) will be selling to prospective clients in your sleep and you should be doing everything you can to ensure that the right message is put across in the right way and as effectively as possible.