Tips on improving your website load speed

In 2010, Google announced that loading speed of websites would be factored in into search rankings. This meant that websites with slow load speed would be ranked lower.

So why did Google decide to include website load speed as a criteria?

The answer is simple. The Internet as we know now is constantly evolving at an incredibly fast speed. From a consumer’s standpoint, we always demand for fast and efficient services and we get impatient whenever they fail to deliver. A prime example would have to queue and wait in line for food. We become dissatisfied and head straight for the exit if the wait is too long. The same goes for loading a website. If loading a website takes too long, we will just move on to the next one.

In the digital sphere, websites with slow load speed suffer because they experience a higher rate of failure in engaging and retaining users on their websites. Users lose interest and patience when they have to wait for more than a few seconds for the webpage to load. This lack of ability to engage them will cost you your rank in your SEO Singapore campaign and ultimately, your business suffers.

Website load speed affects your conversion rates as well. You are not going to achieve a high rate of conversion if your potential clients have to sit through a whole lot of waiting time just to load your page. No one has time for that, even if it’s just a difference of a mere few seconds.

There are many reasons that contribute to slow load speed. One of the most common reasons is your host. The reliability of your host is important, and its quality is usually directly proportionate to the amount you spend getting your host. The cheaper the host, the more unreliable it is in the long run.

People are generally impressed with websites that have a high load speeds, even if they are not consciously aware of it. Compare a website of higher load speed against one with a low load speed. If both websites provide the same services, which would you choose? You will definitely choose the one with faster load speed, because it serves an indication of the company’s efficiency. Bear in mind that every impression of your company counts.

In such cases, you should not concern yourself with content marketing to establish a successful SEO campaign. Instead, you should be focusing on improving and enhancing the user experience on your website. Your website load speed is as equally important as your content marketing strategy if you want to drive up your search rank.

There are various ways to improve your website load speed to enhance your user experience as well.

Invest in a reliable host. You might think that a cheaper host will save you on your initial cost. However, if you look at it in the long run, a cheaper but unreliable host will cost you more than in just monetary terms. It will cost you your rank and your client’s confidence in you. Hence, invest in a reliable host to save you from all the unnecessary hassle in the future.

Decrease HTTP requests. Majority of the load time originates from downloading different components of the websites, such as, images, Flash, scripts, style sheets, etc. Each component has an individual HTTP request made, thus the more components you have on your website, the longer the load time. Therefore, if possible, reduce these HTTP requests. Combine style sheets into one, use CSS instead of images, organise your components to maximise efficiency. Also, put your CSS and Javascript at the bottom of the page as they will hinder progressive rendering of your website.

Utilise your cache system. Caching your pages will facilitate faster load speed. With the enabling of caching, browsers will be able to automatically load your components like CSS, Javascripts, images, etc. without having to download them all over again.

Optimise your images. Choose the correct file format for each image. Incorrect file format slows down loading time. JEPG should be your first option as some browsers may not be able to support PNG fully. Try to keep your images as small as they can be and keep them compressed for your site. Do not make it any larger than they need to be.

As much as possible, choose CSS sprites over images. You can combine your images into CSS sprites. CSS sprites acts like one large image made out of all your other images. Using CSS sprites speed up your website; instead of loading 10 images, the browser loads only one image.

Compress Javascipt, HTML, CSS. Another way to speed up your website’s loading time is to compress Javascript, HTML and CSS. Softwares like YUI or minifier are great at compressing. Use them to compress and rid yourself of unwanted or unnecessary codes to speed up your loading time.

In conclusion, website load speed should not be ignored, even if it is not as major a component to your SEO campaign as your content marketing strategy. Website load speed seeks to enhance the user experience for your website, building trust and confidence by impressing them with the website’s flawless and short page load time.

Think of it as a complement to your SEO campaign’s content marketing strategy. It is near impossible to interest your potential clients to your website if they leave your website because of slow load speed. Your content marketing strategy will not be successful if you fail to engage users to spend time on your website.

Utilise Negative Keywords into Your SEO Campaigns for Budget Saving

In SEO campaigns it is always important to appear top on the search engines. Appearing top on search engines benefits your business because it means you’re your site traffic and clicks leading to your website is high. However, these don’t necessarily translate into higher conversion rates and revenue.

These clicks and traffic are unfiltered, which means there’s an equal chance of getting as many clicks from potential customers compared to irrelevant ones. Higher clicks, however, do translate into higher costs (cost-per-click), especially if your campaign includes the pay-per-click option (PPC) and you spend a bulk of your money paying for irrelevant clicks. How then, can you lower your costs and increase relevant traffic and clicks?

The answer is simple. Adopt the use of negative keywords in your campaign.

What are negative keywords?

To begin, we must first understand the meaning of negative keywords and the part they play in SEO campaigns and SEO services. Negative keywords in a SEO Singapore serve to restrict the appearance of your advertisements only to people who are specifically searching for the products or services that you offer.They prevent your advertisements from being triggered by specific words or phrases.

For example, when you add the word ‘budget’ as your negative word to your campaign, AdWords will automatically prevent your advertisement from appearing on any searches with the keyword ‘budget’.

How do negative keywords work?

Let’s say your company designs websites. Potential customers would probably search for ‘website designing’ or ‘web design company’. These are the keywords you would want to bid for in your AdWords campaign.

What you do not want is to appear in any searches with keywords like ‘free web designing’ or ‘free website templates’. These searchers are probably not your potential customers. Hence, you would want to include them as negative keywords as part of your campaign in other to eliminate these unwanted and irrelevant audiences.

Benefits of utilising negative keywords

Imagine trying to get to your destination but finding a sea of people in your path. With negative keywords, you would be able to reach your targeted audience quickly and efficiently without having to first go through irrelevant searches.

These restrictions are beneficial especially if you are on a tight budget. Including negative keywords in campaigns increases your Return on Investment (ROI), Click-Through Rate (CTR) and reduces your mean Cost-per-Click (CPC). Here are some of the benefits from utilising negative keywords:

• Reaches Highly Targeted Customers. With negative keywords, your advertisement will only be shown to potential customers. Irrelevant searches are eliminated in the process.

• Reduces Costs. The Average CPC is lowered because irrelevant traffic is eliminated through negative keywords, hence you do not need to pay for traffic that will not translate into revenue.

• Better Click-Through Rates (CTR). The probability of irrelevant clicks decreases with negative keywords blocking irrelevant audiences. When your advertisement only appears to the target audience, it results in higher chances of getting relevant clicks.

• Increase in Conversion Rates. You’ll definitely experience improved conversion rates because your clicks are mostly from relevant and potential customers.

• Improvement in Quality Score (QS).QS of your keywords will improve when you add in negative keywords as they increase the relevancy between the searches and the keywords.

What should I keep in mind?

While you might be convinced now that using negative keywords is a really good idea to cut costs and reach out to only potential customers, there are a few things you need to keep in mind:

• Be mindful of the usage of negative keywords. You might think that the more negative keywords you include, the better your potential clientele pool becomes. However, bear in mind that the more restrictions you place on your keywords, the fewer customers you will reach. Hence, a healthy balance is always the way to go.

• Your negative keywords should not clash with your campaign keywords. It is important that your negative keywords do no overlap with your campaign keywords. Your ads would not be able to reach out to your potential customers and might not even appear on search engines if they overlap with your campaign keywords.

• Negative keywords are not entirely fool proof. If your negative keywords consist of more than one word, your ads might still appear on searches that contain only one of your negative keywords. For example, you include the negative keyword term ‘free design’ into the list. There is still a possibility that your ad will appear on searches like ‘cheap web design’ or ‘free website’. However, if the search contains more than one negative keyword your ad would definitely not appear. Hence, if someone searches for ‘free website design’, rest assured that your ad will definitely not appear.

The use of negative keywords is increasingly becoming more popular with the increase in online marketing and the use of SEO Singapore campaigns to boost businesses. They serve the purpose of filtering unwanted audiences and lowers campaign costs for you.

Ultimately, instead of adopting various campaigns to try to increase your traffic flow and business revenue, including negative keywords in your campaign can achieve the same results as well. Comparatively, using negative keywords is definitely the cheaper, easier and more efficient alternative.