Tag Archives: Google

Improve site page speed faster to load by removing extra loaded scripts

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The Google websearch team just announced that they will now consider the speed it takes for a website to load when ranking it in Google search results on google.com.

”Site speed is just one of over 200 signals Google uses to determine search ranking, and because it’s a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. In fact, less than 1% of all search queries on google.com are affected by the site speed signal”.

This factor may not play a major role now, but in future web consider this factor is going to have a great impact on web search results as it seems, so now it’s the time for all the webmasters our their to start thinking about their site page speed.

Google indicates the page performance in webmasters.google.com and recommends the open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on Page Speed. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

14 rules for faster-loading web sites are described on the companion website of Steve Souders. These rules hev been tested on some of the most popular sites on the Internet and have successfully reduced the response times of those pages by 25-50%.

Google & Open Directory: the organized web

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Last update : July 2, 2013
The Google Web Directory integrates Google’s sophisticated search technology with Open Directory pages to create the most useful tool for finding information on the web. Key improvements include the following:

  • Importance ranking
  • Smarter search within directory categories
  • Web search integration
  • Clean, uncluttered user interface
Open Directory Banner

Open Directory

The Open Directory Project (ODP) is a large public directory managed by Netscape. The ODP is maintained by a group of volunteer editors from around the world who evaluate sites for inclusion in the directory. The web pages selected by these editors are organized into a number of broad categories under which are many more specific subcategories. Google uses this hierarchy as the basis for its directory.

class = “notranslate”

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Google Translate Widget

Google Translate Widget

If you use the Google Translate widget on your webpages, sometimes there may be some content that you don’t want to translate. You can add class=”notranslate” to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. If you have an entire page that should not be translated, you can add:

<meta name=”google” value=”notranslate” />

Translations and Transliterations

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Making a website available in multiple languages is important, especially if the target audience is international. Google offers two types of solutions to the Translation challenge. One is by straight online translation via a handy translation widget. The second solution is the Google AJAX Language API.

With the AJAX Language API, it’s possible to translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript. With the AJAX Language API for Transliteration, it’s possible to enable transliteration on any textfield or textarea in a webpage. Transliteration is the process of phonetically converting a word written in one script into another. Transliteration should not be confused with translation, which involves a change in language while preserving meaning. With transliteration, it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other.

Code examples are available at the Google AJAX API’s Playground. A useful tutorial how to add inline language translation to a website with Google AJAX API has been written by Amit Agarwal.

Google Maps API, Mapplets and KLM

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Google offers an API to embed Google maps into personal websites. A Google Maps key is needed to access the API, to apply for the key you need to have a Google account and to agree to the terms and conditions of Google Maps API. The key can be generated online on the Google signup webpage.

Google maps are integrated in a website with Javascript. Embedding static maps without Javascript by using image tags is also possible.

The Google API accepts certain parameters. Some are required while others are optional. The parameter list is given below:

  • center of the map : This parameter takes a comma-separated {latitude, longitude} pair
  • zoom : Maps on Google Maps have an integer “zoom level” which defines the resolution of the current view. Zoom levels between 0 (the lowest zoom level, in which the entire world can be seen on one map) to 19 (the highest zoom level, down to individual buildings) are possible within the normal maps view.
  • size : width and height of the map in pixels; 640×640 is the largest image size allowed
  • format : gif, png or jpg for images
  • maptype : satellite, terrain, hybrid, and mobile (default = roadmap)
  • markers : one or more markers to attach to the image at specified locations. This parameter takes a string of marker definitions separated by the pipe character (|)
  • path : a single path of two or more connected points to overlay on the image at specified locations. This parameter takes a string of point definitions separated by the pipe character (|)
  • span : a minimum viewport for the map image expressed as a latitude and longitude pair
  • frame : specifies that the resulting image should be framed with a colored blue border
  • hl : the language to use for display of labels on map tiles
  • key : the Maps API key for the domain on which this URL request takes place
  • sensor : specifies whether the application requesting the static map is using a sensor to determine the user’s location

The process of turning an address into a geographic point is known as geocoding. Goggle provides a GClientGeocoder object to convert a string address into a latitudes and longitudes.

A marker descriptor contains a string defining the location to place the marker and the visual attributes to use when displaying the marker. These strings contain the following variable values:

  • {latitude} (required) specifies a latitudinal value with precision to 6 decimal places
  • {longitude} (required) specifies a longitudinal value with precision to 6 decimal places
  • {size} (optional) specifies the size of marker from the set {tiny, mid, small}
  • {color} (optional) specifies a color from the set {black, brown, green, purple, yellow, blue, gray, orange, red, white}
  • {alphanumeric-character} (optional) specifies a single lowercase alphanumeric character from the set {a-z, 0-9}. Note that default and mid sized markers are the only markers capable of displaying an alphanumeric-character parameter. tiny and small markers are not capable of displaying an alphanumeric-character

An online tool to create map-markers is available on the donkeymagic website.

The Google geo-developer website prodides documentation, tutorials, code samples, demos, guides and more ressources. A blog for Google geo-developers provides tips and tricks and announcements of new features concerning Google maps. Personal Geo Content can be submitted to Google, guidelines are available on the KLM webpage. KML is a file format used to display geographic data in an Earth browser such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Maps for mobile.

Another useful option are Mapplets, mini-applications that run within Google Maps. You can create Mapplets that add new features or overlay your data on Google Maps.

Mike Williams published a great tutorial about the Google maps API.

Google Analytics API launched

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On april 21th, Google announced that the Google Analytics Data Export API beta is now publicly available to all Analytics users. The API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users.

A list of featured examples from Google customers is available at the Google developer website. All the documentation needed to use the API is found on the same website.

FeedBurner

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FeedBurner is a Chicago-based company that provides media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Its Web-based tools, including an extensive feed and blog advertising network, help publishers promote, deliver, and monetize their content on the Web and make feed-based content more accessible and manageable for its end users. In 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google.

A FeedBurner Blog is available at the Google website. FeedBurner Stats is Google’s analytics offering for blogs, websites and feeds of all kinds. The service is free with every FeedBurner feed and provides publishers with a comprehensive view of their audience.

The FeedBurner Stats service for feeds provides the following feed-related information:

  • Subscription data (e.g. number of subscribers by day, previous week, last 30 days and all time) and Reach data (the estimated number of individuals clicking or viewing your feed content in a given day)
  • Breakdown of feed readers and aggregators, email services, web browsers and bots by which subscribers are accessing your content
  • Clickthrough tracking
  • Uncommon uses — sites where your content has been resyndicated including other blogs, directories and even spam sites
  • Item enclosure downloads (podcasts)
  • Live hits, conveniently translated to your local time zone

For even more insight, you can activate the following PRO features for no charge:

  • Reach
  • Item views

Today I activated FeedBurner for my Blog.

(http://feeds2.feedburner.com/InteractiveRichMedia)

Website visitor tracking

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There are several tools available to analyse and monitor visits to a website or blog in real-time. The common method for reliable tracking consist in inserting a simple piece of javascript code on every webpage and saving a first party cookie on the visitors computer. The cookie allows to distinguish between returning visitors and first time visitors. The sum of returning and first time visitors are called unique visitors.
IP + User Agent tracking typically reports higher numbers than cookie-based tracking because of dynamically assigned IP addresses and spider and robot visits. 3rd party cookies are set by a source other than the website being visited and are often blocked by browsers and security software, whereas 1st party cookies are considered as harmless by spyware protection software.

The most used free tracking and statistics packages are StatCounter, SiteMeter and Google Analytics. A comparison of StatCounter versus Google Analytics has been published by Andy Atkinson on his blog “Pain in the Tech“.

Google Analytics

I prefer Google Analytics, which is based on Urchin, and I use it for different websites since 2006. Google Analytics uses 1st partie cookies, counts a visit even if the page is pulled from a user’s or server’s cache, but it registers only one visit if a user comes to a site twice within thirty minutes without closing their browser. The Google Analytics reports include a dashboard with different site usage overviews and detailed informations about visitors, content, traffic sources and goals. All the data are anonymous and the privacy of the visitors is guaranteed.

Google provides a help page, an official blog and a conversion university for Google Analytics. An unofficial Google Analytics Blog is provided by ROI Revolution. A forum about Website Analytics – Tracking and Logging is available at WebmasterWorld.com. A solid tutorial “8 stupid things webmasters do to mess up their analytics” has been edited by Linda Bustos on Marketing Pilgrim. SiteScan offers a Google Analytics Diagnostic tool designed to provide you with a complete audit of your Google Analytics setup.

Nicolas Lierman is the author of the Google Analytics Reporting Suite developed in Adobe AIR. He published on his website AboutNico.be 5 tips for using Google Analytics.

Webalizer

A famous log file analysis programm for web servers is Webalizer. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser. Written in C by Bradford L. Barrett who started the development in 1997, the program is open source and was designed for running on Linux systems. Version 2.20-01 was released on july 12th, 2008. “What is your webserver doing today ?” is the motto of the webalizer website.

Google Custom Search

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Google Search

Google offers a custom search engine (beta version) to webmasters to create a local search tool on a website or a blog. A quick and easy way consist in integrating a javascript code provided by Google on your webpage. The search engine can be customized to include more sites or to adapt the style of the results pages to the style of the website. Google provides tutorials, FAQ’s, developer documentation and featured examples to help webmasters to design the search tool.

Google’s “Terms of Use” state that you may not in any way frame, cache or modify the Results produced by the Google search engine. The results pages include advertisements placed by Google. For enterprises wanting ad-free results pages, Google offers various price plans for the Google site search.

A solution used in the past by several developers was based on javascript code to open a small search window for doing a local search on a website. An example for searching the saraproft.lu website is given below:

=======================================

<p><a href=”javascript:(function()

{ p=prompt(‘Entrez un texte pour faire une recherche dans le site saraproft.lu via Google Luxembourg.’,”);

if(p)

{ document.location.href=’http://www.google.lu/search?

q=site:saraproft.lu ‘+escape(p)} })();” >

Search</a></p>

=======================================

This solution has some disadvantages with the security mecanisms of the new browser generation and is no longer recommended.