CONNECTICUT WEB DESIGN - INTERNET MARKETING - SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: Apr 10, 2010

"Search Engine Journal" - 3 new articles

Google Officially Counts Site Speed for Web Search Ranking

Google has just officially announced that website speed is now a new signal when it considers web search ranking. Although not too much weight is given to site speed, still Google encourages website owners to consider implementing site speed booster to make their websites rank higher on Google search. This however applies only to Google.com. And site speed is defined by Google as the speed by which websites responde to web requests.

Google also gave two major reasons why site speed is important – it improves user experience and satisfaction when visiting websites and it reduces operating costs.
In determining site speed of a websites it ranks, Google uses various methods and sources. What are those specifically remains secret though.
To evaluate the speed of your site, you can use the following tools, as suggested by the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Officially Counts Site Speed for Web Search Ranking

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Universal Search Feature Added to Google Suggest for Mobile

Google just announced a new simple, and yet very useful feature of its mobile search service. The new feature is actually a spinoff of the universal search features in Google Suggest that helps you fill up your search query with Google’s keyword suggestions.

With universal search feature added to Google Suggest for mobile, you can now get answers to your queries faster while you are on the go, using of course your mobile phones.
Here’s an example given by Google:

For example, let’s say you’re flying to London and want to know: Is my flight on time? Or what is the exchange rate of the pound? As you type the flight “Ba 284″ or “Usd in pounds”, the answers are provided right below the search box, without having to wait for the results page. Other searches that show answers include weather (e.g., “weather london”), stock quotes (e.g., “intc”), current time (e.g., “time london”), calculator (e.g. “29*37″) and unit conversion (e.g., “220 miles in km”).

To use this feature, simply point your phone’s browser to google.com and start typing your search query. If you don’t see special results at first, refresh the page in your phone’s browser.
Universal search features in Google Suggest for mobile supports iPhone/iPods, Android Phones and WebOS. Available for U.S. users only.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Universal Search Feature Added to Google Suggest for Mobile

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Better Search with Web Search Pro (FireFox)

Web Search Pro is an awesome tool I wish I had discovered earlier. It’s a FireFox addon that adds quite a few features around your FireFox search box.
1. Group search engines (for Multi-Search)
This is my favorite feature! The tool allows to group your installed search engines by topic or the purpose (for example, social media search, reference search, etc) and then search multiple search engines at a time (all result pages will open in separate tabs).

2. Drag & DropZones for search
This so-called “a new and innovative way to search the web” works the following way:

Select any term on the page;
Start dragging it;
See “Search boxes”;
Drop your term in any you want to search in:

The “search boxes” are all based on search engines you have installed for your search box:

Drag & DropZones can be customized via the tool settings accessed from the TOOLs menus. From there you can set the look and feel (for example, set the color) and customize the zone order (yes, by dragging them and dropping):

3. Quick Type Search
The tool offers a highly customizable set of keyboard shortcuts to switch between the search engines:

Assign a keyboard shortcut for any search engines;
Group your search engines by topic and assign a keyboard shortcut for the whole group to search all those search engines at a time:

Note: I wasn’t able to get all the shortcuts working. Some of them seemed to interfere with my Web developer toolbar, other with the default FireFox behavior, but some of them worked.
4. Realizable search box
Have you ever thought that there should be some better way to adjust the look and feel of your FireFox search box? Then you’ll love this option: the ability to resize the search box:

To sum up:
The tool offers numerous ways to access your installed search engines: search the web using a search box, through the context menu, keyboard only, with the Quick Type Search popup, or using the brand new Drag & DropZones.
With the numerous feature set, it is a must that all of them could be optional. The flexible settings allow to disable any of the features and customize those enabled (the settings can also be exported and imported).