Website Optimization

How to improve a site’s positioning in search engines’ natural,unpaid results. Citing research that demonstrates that the majority of people don’t scan search engine result pages much beyond the first few sites, he provides simple steps to help sites reach these valued top spots. These tips focus on tools and techniques to help discover productive keywords and key phrases, how to construct pages that will place highly for searches for these words, and tips to help generate inbound links from other sites.

Another chapter in this section provides a thorough discussion of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with services like Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. King starts with a brief summary of the similarities and differences of the most prevalent PPC programs, and then provides a thorough methodology and detailed, quantitative metrics to assist in maximizing the return on one’s investment in these programs.

Each of the aforementioned chapters is followed by a case study where the concepts previously covered are put into practice. These sections do a good job of showing the process of employing the procedures outlined and how they can make a significant positive impact on a website.

Having a highly visible site does little good unless one can convert visitors to customers, though. King concludes the book’s first section with a chapter providing tips to enhance a site’s conversion rate, including suggestions on how to increase a site’s apparent credibility; giving important content a good, prominent position on the page; and writing engaging copy that uses persuasive language.

In the second section of the book, King concerns himself with outlining steps to make sites as responsive as possible. After noting the continued importance speed plays in user’s perceptions, he notes that even with the continually decreasing proportion of users with narrowband connections we still must pay attention to how quickly pages load. He does note, however, that with the increasing number of people on fast connections, small files sizes are less important than addressing the latency involved with loading a large number of objects on each page or employing emerging technologies such as Ajax.

With this new emphasis on reduced latency, he outlines strategies to limit the number of object requests by giving tips on compressing and minimized the number of CSS and script files associated with a web page. Techniques to employ multiple domains to get around most browser limitations of two simultaneous downloads per hostname and delaying script loading to improve perceived load time are also discussed. He also discusses how to effectively employ HTTP compression and caching. Finally, he talks about how content delivery networks, like Akamai, geographically distribute servers.

King ends the book with a chapter detailing metrics to measure the effect of one’s optimization efforts. Among the topics covered is the use of log analysis to ascertain the effectiveness of marketing efforts, and tools like YSlow and IBM Page Detailer to test a site’s response and load times.