Page 4 – Building an empire…one pixel at a time…

Got a Mobile Site? The Importance of Mobile Website Optimization

mobile website optimization There is no doubt mobile device have now become a permanent fixture among the website landscapes. These days it is now more than ever very important that websites be optimized for mobile devices or have a separate optimized mobile website. some mobile devices on the windows platforms are already using the HTML 5 engine. Optimizing your mobile website can increase sales, generate more traffic and heighten customer engagement with your website. It can also provide you one step ahead of your competition.

In August 2011 mobile browsing represented 7.1% (about 1/14) of all worldwide browsing activity.

Smartphones, Tablets and many other mobile internet enabled devices are widely used throughout the world, and the number of users are at a continuous growing speed.

With this growth brings a corresponding growth in mobile internet browsing. In 2009 mobile browsing represented only 0.7% of worldwide browsing activity. Then by August 2011 that number jumped to 7.1% almost at 1000% increase.

Optimizing your website can boost engagement. Research has shown that a mobile optimized website is able to generate almost twice the average traffic than websites without mobile optimization.

Not only can a mobile optimized website boost customer engagement. It can also influence heavily your bottom line. Research has suggested that almost 51% website visitors are more likely to do business at a website if they have a mobile website.

Optimizing your website for mobile users and customer clearly has it’s benefits. although so many website have not still taken the step to optimize their websites for mobile and taking advantage of these benefits. Some think of this task as of rebuilding or redesigning their entire website, which is false information. You can easily and cost effectively optimize your website in far less time and expense. Are you ready to take that step into optimizing your website for mobile uses?

Contact me for more information.

PHP Buffer – Give a Boost to Web Page Speed

Recently, I was in the process of optimizing a web page speed due to Google now ranking websites based on the page load speed. I decided to implement PHP Buffer being the site was entirely php.

PHP output buffering is normally enabled by default. In some older versions of PHP, a string would be sent to your browser every time the interpreter encountered an echo statement or text outside the PHP delimiters.

Output buffering makes this process quicker and more efficient. The buffer is essentially a big memory-resident string. When text is output, it’s appended to the buffer rather than returned to the browser immediately. The buffer is then “flushed”, i.e. its contents are transmitted and the string is reset pending further output. Flushing occurs when:

the PHP interpreter reaches the end of the page
the buffer exceeds the number of bytes specified within PHP’s output_buffering configuration setting, or
the flush() or ob_flush() functions are called

There are a few caveats but, assuming it works within your environment, you should consider flushing the buffer immediately after the page’s </head> tag, e.g.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<title>Buffer flushing in action testing</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" />
</head>
<?php
// flush the buffer
flush();
?>
<body>
…

(If you’re using WordPress, you could use similar code in your theme’s header.php file.)

Once the browser has received the HTML head, it can begin to download all linked CSS files, favicons and other resources. These downloads can occur while the browser is idle and waiting for the main body content.

The speed increase will depend on the server-side processing required, the weight of your page, the quantity and size of your CSS files, and whether the browser has cached any resources. However, it’s such a simple optimization, there’s little reason not to do it.

I’d be interested to know whether this technique results in a perceivable speed difference on your website or application. Please feel free to comment.

SEO Tips and SEO Tricks with Google

So have you ever heard of this search engine called Google?

Well of course you have…Who hasn’t!

Below, I bring you some tips and tricks you may already know and some you might not know of currently. These tools are always very useful when you are performing SEO for your website or client’s websites.

When used enough or over a period of time using, These should become embedded within your mind and skill set, just as if learning mathematics in 3rd grade elementary school.

So let’s get started!

Enter just the word http for your search to find the top 1000 PageRanked sites.

Enter only www in your search to see how Google ranks the top 1,000 sites.

Manually type the following prefixes and note their utility:

* link:url Shows other pages with links to that url.
* related:url same as “what’s related” on serps.
* site:domain restricts search results to the given domain.
* allinurl: shows only pages with all terms in the url.
* inurl: like allinurl, but only for the next query word.
* allintitle: shows only results with terms in title.
* intitle: similar to allintitle, but only for the next word. “intitle:seoforgoogle google” finds only pages with seoforgoogle in the title, and google anywhere on the page.
* cache:url will show the Google version of the passed url.
* info:url will show a page containing links to related searches, backlinks, and pages containing the url. This is the same as typing the url into the search box.
* spell: will spell check your query and search for it.
* stocks: will lookup the search query in a stock index.
* filetype: will restrict searches to that filetype. “-filetype:pdf” to remove Adobe PDF files.
* daterange: is supported in Julian date format only. 2452384 is an example of a Julian date.
* maps: If you enter a street address, a link to Yahoo Maps and to MapBlast will be presented.
* phone: enter anything that looks like a phone number to have a name and address displayed. Same is true for something that looks like an address (include a name and zip code)
* site:www.somesite.net “+www.somesite.+net” – (tells you how many pages of your site are indexed by google)
*allintext: searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title
*allinlinks: searches only within links, not text or title.

There you go, a complete compiled list of google commands to place in your arsenal basket when work on SEO

Feel free to print this page and save for future reference material.