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5 Ways to Speed Up Your Site. Speed kills. But on the Internet, death comes at the hands of a slow-loading page, not a speeding car. Even mighty Google is using site speed as a signal in its search algorithm, and studies have shown that just a fraction of a delay can kill your conversion rate. And that’s just on a normal day. What if you hit the front page of Reddit or decide to run a deal with Groupon? What if, gasp, TechCrunch links to you? Your site can be crippled by people trying to visit, who can’t, and who never come back again. These scenarios are just not good for your business – no matter what it is.

Five Solid Ways to Speed Up Your Site 1) Use a CDN – Whether it’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), or some other network, a CDN can run laps around your server, speeding your content to your visitors. 2) Try Cloudflare – Cloudflare optimizes the performance of your site by doing a whole bunch of cool things, simply by installing their code on your site. 6) Bonus Time! Have an optimization tip to share? Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 35 best practices divided into 7 categories. Minimize HTTP Requests tag: content 80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end.

Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. One way to reduce the number of components in the page is to simplify the page's design. Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. CSS Sprites are the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests. Image maps combine multiple images into a single image. Inline images use the data: URL scheme to embed the image data in the actual page.

Reducing the number of HTTP requests in your page is the place to start. Top | discuss this rule Use a Content Delivery Network tag: server tag: css. Guidelines for Writing a Good About Page. The About page—just about every single website has one. The About page is where site users go to learn more about the site they’re on. If you want to convert visitors to users, capture opportunities to work with people, and give your regular users a deeper appreciation of what your site does, a well written About page is your ticket. The About Page’s Mission The About page is the section of a website where people go to find out about the website they’re on. Readers will visit this section for many reasons and with various questions they want answered, but your objective is the same: to inform them why they are on the site or why they should be on the site.

Who Reads About Pages? It’s helpful to define the audience you’re writing your About page for. Group 1: First Time Visitors This group may have been referred to your site by a friend, or may have stumbled upon one of your web pages through a search engine result or social media service. Group 2: Regular Users Who are you? Who are you? 12 of the Best About Us Pages on the Internet | Blog Tyrant – Dominating the Blogosphere.

Last Update August 7th, 2014 Something that I have wanted to do for a long time is take a look at the web’s best About Us pages. Why? Because a good About Us page is very hard to come by. Normally they are a boring, self-serving mix of me me me and us us us. But a they are so vital to your business. In this post I am going to show you what I consider to be 12 of the best About Us pages on the internet. A good About Us page is nothing without… It doesn’t matter how good your About Us page is if you don’t have your own domain name and web host. If you are using a free blog like Tumblr or Blogger you are growing a brand that you don’t fully own or control. Quick interruption: BlueHost is currently giving Blog Tyrant readers a free domain name and a discount rate of $3.95 per month to get your own web address and hosting package.

The definition of a good About Us page I need to start this article by qualifying what makes an amazing About Us page. 12 of the best About Us pages on the internet 1. 8 Quick Tips for Writing Bullet Points People Actually Want to Read. Recapping the 5 Keys to Brand Discovery. Last week, the Paid Discovery team hosted the “5 Keys to Brand Discovery” webinar.

Nearly 200 tweets rocked out for our hashtag #BrandDisco along the way! We understand not everybody could make it out to talk shop, so we have included an overview of what was discussed, in hopes of stirring up some thoughts on how to make the Internet a more brand friendly (and not annoying) space. You can find a recap of the presentation, highlighting the various strategies of creation, design and distribution to reach optimal discovery through SlideShare. Overall, our key points highlighted: 1) Add social buttons to your site! One button alone can drive a 25% lift in traffic. 2) Drive to content pages, not home pages. Discovery means people want the curation done for them. 3) Provide a valuable experience before asking for your sales pitch. 4) It’s okay to have a lot of text, so long as you frame it properly. 5) Maintain a healthy budget of maintaining your distribution across multiple channels.

HOWTO: Get traffic to your website the right way. There are thousands of sites out there that will sell you hits to your website. The big ones you may know are Google, and Overture etc. However, these are mostly overpriced as they work on a bidding system where you bid against others on keywords. For example, if you type "Christian Web Hosting" on Google you get all those links on the right and the top. These are paid advertising links. Every time you click a link, the advertiser pays ... up to $50.00 for a click! Then you get the smaller advertisers. Examples of this kind of advertising include those who sell you paid niche market indices, pop-under ads, pop-up ads, pay per click ads, banner adds and redirected traffic. Niche market indices There are several Christian sites -- big and small -- offering this kind of advertising for a price. Pay per click Pay per month/year etc. Pay per month is obviously much easier to budget for as your cost is fixed but it will depend on how much traffic a site gets.

Don't! Redirected traffic. Eight Easy Backlinks from Social Media Profiles | Hostway Web Resources | Hostway Web Solutions. Link-building is one of the most important activities you can do to maximize search engine optimization (SEO) for your website; it’s also one of the most daunting. Luckily, there are dozens of sites you’re likely already familiar with that can get you started. These sites provide dofollow links – also called backlinks – which incorporate HTML markup that informs the search engines to follow the destination inside the link. With the ability to influence the target page’s PageRank, dofollow links require minimal effort and, for the most part, are under your control.

Dofollow links offer a wealth of benefits: They help improve indexing when good quality links are created;They increase credibility and ranking in search engines;They boost traffic to your website. Many sites alternatively use nofollow links, so it’s imperative to understand the difference between the two. Google+: On Google+, not all links are created equal. Republication Requests Interested in republishing a Hostway article?

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eCommerce. Drupal Modules. 12 Steps to a Better Landing Page – Infographic. Loved the latest YouMoz post on SEOmoz by Oli Gardner (Co-Founder of Unbounce.com) who combines 2 of our favorite topics together: Infographics and Landing Pages. Oli provides a 12 step infographic detailing how to rehab your landing pages. Landing page tips and infographic below: One Page Per SourceA/B TestingAd Message MatchContext of UseVideos Increase ConversionDirection CuesData vs.

ConversionEdit RuthlesslyEnable Social SharingTrust & Social ProofOne Page – One PurposePost Conversion Marketing. The Five Elements Your Website Must Have, No Matter What | Seth Leonard. How it works. Font Image Generator - Create images from text.