Any experienced website owner will be so familiar with the idea that performance and low-latency are good things that it seems almost condescending to point it out. And yet, every year millions of dollars in potential income from advertising revenue and sales are lost because solo site owners and SMEs aren’t investing sufficient time and effort to ensure that their sites are fast enough to provide a good experience for users.
Most of us are using a content management system of some sort, whether that’s WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal, all of which need a helping hand when it comes to delivering assets as quickly as possible. That’s usually accomplished with some form of caching, but no amount of on-server caching is going to help a site overcome the laws of physics. (more…)
Video sharing sites pose a particular set of problems for search engine optimization. Google’s crawlers can’t interpret video content and so rely on the textual content and markup that surrounds the videos to get an idea of the terms for which videos should be ranked. It’s likely that Google is going to get better at interpreting video content in the future — they’re certainly working on artificial intelligence algorithms that recognize the subject of moving images and that can pull textual transcriptions out of videos — but the technology in its current form is rudimentary, and so owners of video sharing sites should make sure to optimize the pages their videos appear on properly.