Viewing 1 - 2 of 2 posts tagged with optimization.

14 Feb '12

SEO Consultants are not Necessarily Experts

I've always been a bit confused by people who consider themselves SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultants. It's not that I don't think such a position should exists - on the contrary, SEO is an important part of the web development process that is often overlooked by web designers and programmers. What confuses me is how they consider themselves experts.

Most of these consultants devote their focus on Google. This makes a lot of sense, with Google being the elephant in the room when it comes to search engines. However, it seems that the majority of their focus is always on the algorithm and how it changes over time. When Google made the Panda update early in 2011, there was a big push for unique, organic content on sites. SEO consultants seem to be reactionary, watching to see what Google determines is important in determining good content and structure is. This is the wrong approach.

Well-rounded web developers take a simple stance when it comes to SEO. Just build out a web presence that make sense. Each page on a website has a ...

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14 Oct '09

Using Headers for Caching

One of my main goals while redoing my website is to optimize my content, both on the frontend and backend. The frontend is something that I've always considered to be the most important in terms of a fast user experience - I'm not crunching enough data on the backend to worry about long processing delays for users. However, depending on the connection, I've noticed delays upwards of five seconds in between pages, which is completely unacceptable.

There's a few things that a web developer can do to speed up the frontend. Decreasing the number and lowering the size of the unique elements are two of the most obvious. If the user only has to download two small stylesheets instead of five, your site will appear faster. What I wanted to do was take this a step further; repeat visitors will not have to download any new stylesheets, scripts, or images. The only http request will be the xHTML content. This can be handled by using the built in caching components of the internet.

There are several different ways that website can cache information ...

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Viewing 1 - 2 of 2 posts tagged with optimization.