Last week Google rolled out a feature they’re calling Instant Previews. It allows searchers to see a preview of websites appearing in their results without clicking through to the site.

If you conduct business online, Google is an 800 pound gorilla you need to keep tabs on: chances are they deliver a lot of your traffic. There’s still a lot of dust yet to settle, but there are some issues that you should start thinking about now.
Check The Mirror Before You Leave

If you haven’t seen Instant Previews, try it out. It’s pretty handy. It will be particularly helpful for searches where the description appearing in the results doesn’t clearly communicate site content.

But it does give you something else you need to think about: Google Instant Preview is another opportunity to put your “best foot forward” with potential customers. Which means it’s another place you need to be examining your presentation and branding.

Most previews will be too small to discern any significant copy, will your pages still represent your brand effectively? Can you communicate your value proposition in a preview? Is your site design compelling enough to entice users to click through?

Take a look at some examples before you assume that the answer to that question is always “Yes:”

This is what Flash sites look like in Google Instant Preview:

Even javascript and Ajax appear to the problematic. Here’s Apple.com, a site that champions web standards, and a product of arguably the best branding machine on the planet:

Designing pages and using technology that affords a good presentation and user experience is going to payoff for the businesses that start now.
Check Your Numbers Before You Report Them

We at [meta]marketer, and in the wider analytics community, are still investigating what this is going to mean, and Google has been characteristically opaque about how this will affect measurement.

It is clear the “render fetches” by Google that create the preview image are being counted. This means you can expect your visits, visitors, and pageviews and bounce rate to increase. If you use any of those metrics – for example to report to advertisers or investors – you’ll need to take precautions to prevent reporting false results. Keep in mind that the more traffic you receive from organic search, and the more frequently you appear in search rankings, the more skewed this is likely to be.

Unfortunately, knowing that doesn’t lead to an easy solution. This is especially true if you’re using Google Analytics – as most sites are – since it simply doesn’t provide the tools to examine or filter these preview fetches without significant development work – and even then, prospects are limited.

If you’re intrepid, the user agent sting for previews appears to be consistently reported as:
Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13

but getting that data into your measurement tools and using it is going to take some work. The whole community will be discussing and investigating this problem for the foreseeable future.
But Wait, There’s More

Since it gives you another point of contact with potential visitors, it would be nice to measure whether searchers who see your preview actually click through. After all, the more effectively you use Google, the more relevant traffic you’re going to get. As use of Google Instant Previews increase, your ability to measure and affect preview performance is going to impact your success.

Unfortunately, you can’t. As I said earlier, the “render fetches” that happen when Google is generating previews do count as views and visits in your metrics, so you might think you could somehow use that to determine a clickthrough rate. The problem? Those fetches don’t happen when a searcher previews your site, as you might expect.

In Google’s blog post introducing the feature, Raj Krishnan says:

Once you click the magnifying glass, we load previews for the other results in the background so you can flip through them without waiting.

Which means that your preview is going to be fetched if a user previews any search result appearing on the same result page as your site, even if the searcher doesn’t preview your page. So for now it looks like there’s no way to determine whether a visitor viewed a preview before clicking through to your site.
So, What Do I Do?

The first thing you should do is perform searches for the keyphrases you’re concerned with and check out the previews Google displays for your pages. Don’t check to see if they look accurate, but see if they would entice a searcher to click through to your site. If not, you’ve now got another project on your plate.

Once you’re off and running, you’ll also have to address the analytics problems. Do you need to invest technical resources in mitigating skewed data? Is your analytics platform sophisticated enough to tackle the problem? How does this affect your ability to compare historical site performance? What are you going to do about it?

Google wasn’t satisfied with just having Instant Search, now it has introduced something called Instant Previews. Searchers and web users can now browse a large instant “preview” of a site’s content by placing the cursor over the small magnifying glass displayed beside each listing. These previews are large and Google sometimes highlights a major paragraph or quote from each displayed site.

Searchers can get a general look at the layout and design of a site, onpage graphics and bold headlines can usually be seen from the preview. However, small print and the general content of the page can’t be read, so searchers will have to click through to your site if they want to read your information. Assuming of course, they don’t find what they’re looking for in the headlines or bold print.

Whether searchers will use this new feature remains to be seen, but these instant previews could have some ramifications on who gets the “click through” to their site. One would also reason that getting the top spot in the rankings have diminished somewhat, if searchers can quickly preview all of the top 10 listings and then make their decision. So they might not click the top listing, but decide one lower down is worth clicking. This could make any listing on the first page more worth having, not just the top one.

This doesn’t really affect any of your SEO strategies and you should be optimizing for the search engines as usual. After all, getting those top rankings for your targeted keywords in the major search engines is what brings in the quality traffic to your site. In this regard, it’s business as usual.

However, Google’s Instant Previews does change the whole nature of SERPs or rather Google’s search results in that webmasters and marketers have another hurdle to get past before they get that final click. Searchers might click your top number one ranking preview and decide your page is not up to standard or it’s not what they’re looking for, and can quickly try out the other listings instead.

From Google’s perspective these previews could improve the “overall” quality of their results because searchers will come away happy, especially if they have not wasted their time clicking on a link, only to find it’s not what they’re looking for. Now they can easily find the right results more quickly and efficiently.

For the webmaster or online marketer, these new Instant Previews can be seen as another chance to get that all important click. They must make sure their page design is up to scratch and featuring a catchy headline which draws visitors to their page or site. Also, highlighting a well worded summary could help attract more of these visitors. So too, would placing your main keyword phrase in bold print so that it can be read from the preview.

Needless to say, webmasters/marketers must always keep their targeted keywords front and center. Highlighting them on your page in the main title is already a given, but now you should make sure they can be read from the preview. This could possibly give you an edge with it comes to getting that click from Google.

On a more general note, these previews also add to the time searchers will spend on Google’s results pages. Google has been steadily focusing on this factor in recent months. Why? One good reason – the longer a searcher stays on your page the more likely they are to click your paid ads. Stands to reason, if the searcher can’t find what they’re looking for in the so-called “free organic listings” (actually, truth be told, for very lucrative keyword phrases these are not free, nor organic) they will look to the paid Adwords listings.

If you check out the average time spent on Google, according to Alexa, in 2009 it was around 7 minutes and now in 2010 that average has jumped to around 14 minutes. And that’s before both Google Instant Search and Google Instant Previews are fully rolled out and implemented. One would expect that number to go much higher. While this is nowhere near Facebook’s average time of 31 minutes, Google has still doubled the time it had only a year ago. No wonder, Google can afford to give their employees that 10% raise, they have probably earned it.

Nor should Google be criticized for doing all of this, they are a business and their goal is to bring in more revenue. Besides, these previews will no doubt improve the effectiveness of Google’s SERPs. Searchers can more quickly find what they’re searching for on Google and come away happy. A satisfied customer is the ultimate goal of any business, why should Google be judged any differently.

However, for the webmaster and online marketer, keeping Instant Previews in mind when creating webpages is a must. Here are some suggestions you can follow:

1. Improve Your Graphics – These can really grab the searcher’s attention in the preview so it’s vital to have eye-popping graphics right next to your important information.

2. Create Great Headlines – Good headlines quickly capture the searcher’s attention and draws him/her to your page; just make them bold enough to be seen in Google’s previews.

3. Write An Informative Summary – Place your important information in a short summary which also captures the viewer’s attention. Entice these viewers to visit your site or page.

4. Take A Multi-Layered Approach – Just don’t aim all your marketing towards free organic search, but try video listings, news listings, image listings… to get other ways onto Google’s first page.

5. Finally, PPC Advertising – This is probably not what you want to hear, but paid listings through Google Adwords is another option. Besides, for extremely lucrative keywords, as more and more major companies throw major funds into SEO and Keyword Link Buying, organic search is not really free or even available to everybody anymore. For the small-time webmaster or marketer, paid listings in Google may be your only option and that option is quickly becoming too costly for many.

Of course, how Instant Search and Instant Previews play out in the near future is still open to wide speculation. Will searchers even use those added features in their daily searches? Or will users opt–out and go back to a more gentle, less hurried Google? One thing that all of us can be sure of, Google will be constantly rolling out new features and innovations just to make all our lives a little more interesting.

You’ve no doubt heard or read about Facebook’s new messaging announcement this week. If not, the company announced a new messaging system to combine email, SMS, IM, Chat, and other forms of online communication, bringing them into one inbox. Along with this comes @facebook.com email addresses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the system as “starting from scratch” as opposed to being a Facebook email product.

Pat Matthews, SVP of RackSpace’s cloud computing business, which includes business email, shared some thoughts with us about the impact Facebook’s new offering will have on the email industry. RackSpace itself powers business email for over 2 million users.

“I don’t think Facebook will encroach on business mail, at least not anytime soon, mostly because of the security and privacy implications,” Matthews tells WebProNews. “Facebook is very consumer oriented and I don’t see this crossing into business anytime soon. Mark Zuckerberg has specifically stated the company is all about consumers. His focus is leading them to greatness.”

“I do think consumer mail is at risk,” he adds. “Consumers live in Facebook, not on Google. I think that Gmail and AOL should be worried.”

Still, Google has Google Apps going for it, which it has now expanded to encompass most of the company’s offerings. That could play a significant role in keeping businesses using Google, though Gmail has always been a part of Google Apps. I have to wonder if Google’s news wasn’t somehow spurred by Facebook’s.

“Facebook users will use Facebook mail as an extension of their already popular messaging services,” says Matthews. “I have no doubt this will be extremely popular.”

“Facebook is one of the most innovative companies on the planet,” he adds. “I think that they will influence all types of applications, business and consumer.”

It’s no secret that businesses are already placing a great deal of emphasis on reaching Facebook users, and it will be very interesting to see the impact the new messaging system has on their strategies. I’ve already speculated that we’ll start seeing more businesses utilizing personal profiles to try and get into Facebook users’ primary inboxes (as the system filters messages that aren’t from “friends” into a secondary inbox).

Social media and email have been getting closer and closer with one another for some time already. “In the past, organizations supported collaboration through e-mail and highly structured applications only,” said Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, who predicts 20% of employees will use social networks as a main business communication tool by 2014.

“Today, social paradigms are converging with e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and presence, creating new collaboration styles,” she said. “However, a truly collaborative, effective and efficient workplace will not arise until organizations make these capabilities widely available and users become more comfortable with them. Technology is only an enabler; culture is a must for success.””

When asked what Facebook’s new system means for the larger trend of social networking and email converging, Matthews told WebProNews, “Consumers want one view for many things but they also want very different views for their personal and business lives. This is why I really think Gmail should be worried.”

It is worth noting that the conversation with Matthews took place before Google’s announcement, so I’ll have to find out if this changes his opinion on that.

A low bounce rate is often cited as a hallmark of a good website – 40% or lower is typically heralded as the goal – signaling that visitors are engaged with your site and finding useful content. A high bounce rate is often assumed to mean that your site is not doing its job. In reality, bounce rate means different things for different sites and the emphasis you place on it will vary according to the type of site you have and its goals.

What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

The definition from Google’s Analytics help pages is: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”
When is Bounce Rate a Relevant Metric?

– If you have a sales or conversion process which requires the user to follow through multiple pages on your site.
– If exploration of your site is important to your goals.
– If you are trying to turn new visitors into loyal readers or customers.
– If yours is a retail site and you want people to shop around and make purchases.
– If your homepage is not inducing further clicks, particularly if it contains blog excerpts or other ‘teaser’ content.

What a High Bounce Rate Could Mean:

1. Keywords and content are mismatched.

In cases where visitors are coming from search engines, a high bounce rate may mean that the keywords they used and the content they found on your site are not aligned – so your site doesn’t meet their expectations in some way.

What you can do:

Analyze your keyword traffic and make sure your pages are optimized for the keywords you want and that the content is closely aligned with keywords and not misleading in any way.

2. The next step in your conversion or goal process is not obvious or easy enough.

What you can do:

Look at your landing pages with an objective eye and make the next step clear and easy to take.

3. The navigation on your site is confusing or unclear, making additional content hard to find.

What you can do:

Re-evaluate the navigation and see if there are ways to streamline or simplify. Also double-check for browser compatibility – perhaps the page is not displaying correctly under some conditions.

4. Your offer or product is not presented in a compelling or easy to understand way.

What you can do:

Look at your sales copy or offér details and see if you can refresh it or make it more appealing. You could try split-testing different versions to see which performs better.

5. Your site has technical problems. Particularly if your bounce rate suddenly spikes or displays an unusual trend, it could be an indication of technical issues – broken images or links, or something on the page not loading correctly.

What you can do:

Check for compatibility and broken links. Test the load speed of the page and generally make sure your code is as clean and functional as possible. Check for server outages and other issues that could have temporarily affected the functionality of your site.

A high bounce rate might not be a problem if:

– You have a blog homepage containing all your recent posts in their entirety – Blogger blogs are notorious for this. When all your posts are presented up front there would be little reason for someone to clíck to any other pages.

– You have a loyal blog following and your site has a higher proportion of returning visitors than new visitors. Your followers and subscribers may just want to read the newest post and have no need to visit other pages.

– you are promoting a landing page which contains the call to action within it, such as submitting an email address. That single page can do its job effectively without requiring further clicks.

– the call to action or conversion takes your visitor off-site – to an external shopping cart or email sign up for example. This would look like a bounce, but can still be a conversion.

– Blogs typically have higher bounce rates compared to other types of sites so the same benchmarks do not apply.

Bounce Rate is Not the Only Metric.

Don’t look at bounce rate in isolation – look at the overall picture of your website and how it’s performing according to the metrics that matter to you. What DO you want your visitors to do at your site? Are you making it easy for them to do that, and are you measuring it?

Look for trends and other data that give you a fuller picture of what the bounce rate really means:

– Is the bounce rate higher or lower for certain keywords?

– Does it vary according to how people found your site? Search engines vs. social media, for example.

– How does it vary with New vs. Returning visitors?

– Which particular pages or types of content on your site have higher or lower bounce rates?

– Look also at length of time the visitor spends on the page which could indicate whether or not they are reading what they find – this is very important for a blog.

If you run your own web server, then Google has a new tool for apache that will be of great interest to you! It is an apache mod called mod_pagespeed.

page speed does require you to compile it from the source code, but there are very well documented instructions that you can just copy and past to process all the commands.

Somewhere within Google, there’s an organization known as the “Make the Web Faster” initiative, and today, a representative presented the world with a gift. Something new named mod_pagespeed is supposed to make streamlining a site a quick, easy process.

“We just launched a new open-source Apache module called mod_pagespeed that any webmasters can use to quickly and automatically optimize their sites. (It’s like Page Speed, but makes the changes automatically.)”
Then, in case anyone was wondering whether mod_pagespeed is worth looking into, the representative continued, “It can reduce page load times by up to 50% – in other words, essentially speeding up websites by roughly 2x.”

With google the latest and greatest thing to rule your placement in google search is indeed page speed. so it is as much a SEO benefit as what it will be to keeping users engaged into your site. In the age of “i want it now” it’s common knowledge that would-be visitors bail when things take too long to load. So mod_pagespeed should be of definite use to webmasters.
Plus, as Google factors site speed into Web search rankings, having a fast site will help ensure that would-be visitors are directed to it in the first place.

In any event, it’s a good bet that more site speed tools and suggestions are on the way. Google’s representative wrote, “At Google, we’re obsessed with speed – we measure it, pick it apart, think about it constantly. It’s even baked into our quarterly goals.”

So you’ve got yourself a website and are all excited about it. You tell your friends, colleagues and business contacts and the first thing they say is ” Oooh.. that’s great, you can link to mine and I’ll link to yours”… and everybody involved thinks this is a great idea because hey, the more links you have the more popular your site is with Google.

Now this is all very well if you are talking about a few links between ‘networking businesses’, but in the bigger picture, exchanging reciprocal links is not a good way to ingratiate your site with Google.

Be wary of joining Link Exchange Schemes or you could catch a nasty cold!

If reaching Page 1 were that easy, all we’d have to do is put a couple of hundred (or a thousand) links from our web pages to other pages and ask them to do the same. Websites would immediately become ‘huge link banks’ rather than sources of information which is essentially what they should be in every case, even commercial sites.

Google views 1 to 1 reciprocal linking very, very low in importance, for just that reason.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do your friends a favor and they not do the same for you, but just think about what Google thinks is important or you might just experience a long-term negative impact.

Google LIKES inbound links to your site where there is no reciprocal link back. Why? Because that scenario is a neutral (and therefore more valuable) editorial vote for your site’s content.

Google ABSOLUTELY LOVES the inbound (and not reciprocated) link where the link is from a site that is relevant and complementary to your’s, ESPECIALLY if that site is regarded highly by Google already. So if you do arrange that reciprocal link with a business friend, just consider that your visitors may find their site irrelevant to what they are looking for. e.g. don’t link to your friend’s Doggie Washing Service if your site is about Commercial Property Investment for example. Keep it relevant.

So how do you go about getting quality links?

What about Link Exchanges? You know, those people who drop an e-mail into your inbox, offering a campaign where your site offers other sites (with similar relevant content to yours) a link, and in exchange they add a link to yours.

Well, we’ve just blown reciprocal links out of the water, but schemes that promise hundreds of links are not a good idea.

Don’t take my word for it. This is what Google has to say:

“..Excessive link exchanges, could “negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.”

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to incréase your site’s ranking or Page Rank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web, as your ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

“Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.”

“The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.”

So ok. If you can’t use Link Exchanges, how do you go about getting quality ‘votes’ for your site?

Link exchanges used to be popular, but are the old way of getting links and although links of any type to your site are still counted, there is always the risk that you could catch a very bad cold if you actively participate in link exchanges.

Start to look at the social networking sites and get your site out there. Social networking sites such as Digg, Twitter, Delicious, Facebook, and StumbleUpon are able to drive massive traffic to your site; but only if you have unique and interesting content.

The more interesting your content, the greater the chance that someone else will find your content useful to their visitors and link to you. Always consider your outbound links as part of your content.

If you link to sites stuffed with irrelevant adverts or to a site that tells you how to Wash a Dog (and your site is about Property Investment), then visitors are going to question your motives and will not link their sites to yours.

So focus on good quality content and then look at using social networking to drive visitors to your site. If you have good content, then other sites will start to link to yours.

If you ARE involved in Link Exchanges, visit the reciprocal links as often as you can and make sure you don’t have an unhealthy neighbor and that you still have a link back.

Always remember that the risks of a Link Exchange system far outweigh the benefits.

Google’s new Instant real time search has sent massive shock waves through the online SEO and search engine market community.

If you’re a webmaster or an online marketer you’re probably checking your stats/traffic/conversion numbers like never before – Google sure knows how to make everyone dance!

None of this would matter if Google wasn’t the most dominant search engine on the planet. Google means traffic, Google means targeted customers, and Google means money in the bank for countless online marketers and webmasters who receive all of the above from the little search engine that roared.

What is really frightening, Google almost has a monopoly on the online search market, especially now with Yahoo being powered by Bing. Webmasters and marketers can now only rely on two search engines to supply their search traffic.

While there are numerous sources of viable traffic on the web outside of the search engines… many marketers already have the majority of their online marketing geared to the search engines, especially Google.

Most of these same marketers were instantly worried (some say horrified) how Google’s new real time search would impact their marketing, especially their long-tail keywords which bring in most of the sales?

While the jury is still out on that one, other issues are popping up regarding “paid listings” and how it is now more dominant in search results, pushing the free organic listings down further and sometimes pushing them out of the fold.

Even with the arrow keys now coming into play, many searchers are just too lazy to scroll and will just click the first visible listings.

Perhaps even more important are the results which pop-up when you first start typing in your search query. These are really the golden winners in Google’s Instant Search. Having your site or company listed when a searcher types the first letter – has to be a real traffic bonanza.

Now these results vary from country to country, the results showing for the United States are slightly different from those showing for Canada.

Again, Google is showing why it is the top search engine in the world – the Canadian results are well matched with NHL, Canadian Tire, BMO, Rogers, Via Rail… all showing up.

Below you will find a list of the 26 American and Canadian Golden Winners in Google’s new Instant Search. These first letter offerings will vary somewhat according to your location and as search queries change over time. Plus, if you’re logged into Google, your starred or bookmarked favorite sites will be listed at the top.

United States Canada

amazon…………air canada
best buy……….bmo
craigslist……..canadian tire
dictionary……..dictionary
ebay…………..ebay
facebook……….facebook
gmail………….gmail
hotmail………..hotmail
ikea…………..ikea
jet blue……….job bank
kohls………….kijiji
lowes………….lotto max
mapquest……….mapquest
netflix………..nhl
orbitz…………osap
pandora………..paypal
quotes…………quotes
rei……………rogers
sears………….skype
target…………tsn
usps…………..utube
verizon………..via rail
weather………..walmart
xbox…………..xbox
yahoo………….youtube
zillow…………zellers

As you can plainly see there are some differences in the instant listings for each country, reflecting the search queries which are made. Regardless, those websites which pop up first will no doubt get much more traffic, especially for the commercial sites and companies. These golden winners are smiling all the way to the bank.

The way people search is changing. That much is clear. Some of that is their own doing, and some of it is the doing of search engines. People are increasingly going to apps or social media for retrieving different types of information. Google recently released Google Instant and expects to change user behavior with it.

Last week, we discussed what impact Google Instant might have on SEO. The topic has been widely discussed around the web. The conclusion some of us reached is that SEO will not die, but will continue to change, but one still can’t help but wonder how to divide efforts among SEO and other forms of online marketing. Neil Jones at ISEdb.com writes:

Getting top spot is now even more important. If you can dig out some heat maps of Google search results from a couple of years ago, you will see people were clicking all over the page, If you look at recent heat maps they have managed to corral people into predominantly clicking on the top 3 results.

It has always been important to get high rankings but now it is looking like; if you’re not number 1 you’re not getting the click. The combination of Google Instant and the sponsored search results pushes the organic SERPS right down the page, in a lot of the searches I have done, the only result that is left above the fold is the number one listing, Real estate on the first page was tough enough to come. Now it could be clicks that are going to get harder to come that are unless you’re number one.

Google denies that they sandbox new websites. Yet, webmasters and SEO gurus alike have been frustrated to no end by the sandbox effect noted when a new website is launched. Google does acknowledge that there may be something in the algorithm that penalizes new websites and gives them lower rankings until they have proven their value. The reasons for such a filter are many and include keeping people from putting up multiple sites with links to one another when one website is what they need. Whatever the reasons behind ending up there, time spent in the Google Sandbox is still important to success.

Whether it was a conscious decision on the part of Google owners or not, they have written into the algorithm a set of filters that manage to establish the quality of a website using time-based indicators. These indicators include the age of the web site or domain, the age of different backlinks and inbound links to the site, and other factors. One important feature to note is that not only new sites are found in the sandbox. Older sites that suddenly get a rush of inbound links are often sandboxed while the value of the links is established.

With these points in mind, many who have paid for SEO services and still ended up in Google Sandbox are wondering what they can do to get out. Sadly, the only true way to climb out is to be patient. Time is actually on the side of those who are in the sandbox. There are several reasons for this.

The first reason is that time spent in the sandbox allows the website owner to work on tweaking any problem that is found with the site so that it is 100 percent ready when page rank climbs to a point where new visitors are coming in large numbers. This is the best time to test and fix any programming errors noted.

The second reason is that it allows you to work on the content of your site and any related sites linked to it. On the internet, content is king and Google is no different on that score. New, keyword optimized content appearing regularly with links that go back to a site that has been sandboxed catch attention and increase the odds of getting out sooner. Of course, these links must be relevant to the material on the website to be of any real value.

It gives webmasters time to establish relationships with others that are considered authorities in their fields. These authorities can include links to a site in their own pages. If these individuals are recognized as authorities in their fields, the value of their links increases dramatically.

Trust is an important part of any business relationship. There are some sites on the internet that are trusted more than others. Links from these sites are seen as more trustworthy by the search engine, and can help boost page rank quickly.

Ideally, you should try for a trifecta by seeking out relevant links from sites owned by recognized authorities in the field who have been deemed trustworthy by Google and users doing business with them. These links can combine in an exponential manner to boost a page ranking significantly regardless of the page’s age.

Another trick to consider is not limiting yourself to Google when performing SEO operations. One can be in the Google Sandbox and still get good organic results on other search engines such as Yahoo or Ask Jeeves.

You can also optimize for more long tailed keyword phrases. The sandbox effect only seems to affect sites that use highly competitive keywords. Therefore, if you sell an item that can be described in the keywords, the longer keyword phrases may help increase page rank. Of course, you must choose keywords that users are likely to type into the search engine.

In a nutshell, to take advantage of these time-based indicators, you should:
Get links that deliver the most trust, first.
Start your website today and also begin your link-building task as well
Target quality 4-in-1 links. This means going for links that are Relevant, Authoritative, from Trusted sources and from High page rank pages.

The Google Sandbox is real, despite denials from Google. These filters are part of the algorithm that assigns page ranks and they do penalize new sites that use competitive keywords. They also penalize established sites that enter into link farming agreements and try to manipulate the rankings artificially. The filters are age related for the age of the domain, the age of the links to the pages, and other factors.

The time spent in the Google Sandbox is important for the success of any web based business. To be more precise, what is done during this time is important. This is an opportunity to work out any bugs in your website that could hurt business. It is also an opportunity to establish high quality relationships with other site owners who can provide links to your site that are relevant, authoritative, from trusted sources, and coming from pages that are ranked highly, allowing you to take advantage of their rank until your own comes into being.

After Google started using website speed as a parameter in their ranking algorithms every webmaster has a good reason to keep an eye on the page load speed of their website. Google’s bending over backwards to spread the word about this new speed penalty is proof in itself since big G is usually very secretive about pending algorithm changes.

From the announcement we learn that the speed penalty was introduced following experiments by Google that revealed the impact website speed has on Internet users.

But the results of the experiment come as no surprise even for someone that has started to use the Internet recently; users prefer websites that load faster and tend to spend more time on such websites.

However, the search engine giant has been careful to state that even though website speed is now a factor, it is not the primary parameter for determining results. The quality and relevance of information is still the determining factor, but if your website speed is slow, you will receive a Google penalty.

This implies that it is important for you as a webmaster start to assess the speed of your website to determine whether you are moving further down the search engine results pages (SERPs) because your website is slower than your direct competitors.

How Can Google Know Your Page Speed?

It is vital that you understand the basics of how Google’s algorithm determines your website speed and thus your SERP ranking. The search engine uses two main factors when it comes to speed assessment.

First, your website will receive a higher speed ranking if it responds faster to Googlebot, the crawler program Google uses to find and index websites.

Second, your website will also receive a good speed ranking if it records a faster loading time on Google Toolbar than your competition. To better assist you in analyzing your website speed, Google has added a page speed report to their webmaster tools found within the Google webmasters ‘lab’ section.

The tool and the reports can be used to compare your website’s page load times to that of other websites. Once you are armed with the information of where your page ranks in the speed hierarchy, you can start to make the necessary code and structure changes to make it respond faster.

Your first priority should be to make sure you have no SLOW pages on your site. Pages that take two seconds or more to load and pages that are marked as SLOW in Google Webmaster Tools need to be improved to avoid a Google penalty for website speed.

When you have no slow pages left, try to make all your pages load in less than a second. Read on to see why this is important.

Having a website that loads quickly has more benefits than just higher search engine ranking and avoiding a Google penalty.

A website optimized for speed reduces the bandwidth required on your hosting service, thus reducing your overall hosting costs.

Faster websites also provide a better browsing experience because users are able to get information faster and navigate through your website more easily.

In addition, websites optimized for speed work better when accessed on mobile phones, PDAs and other devices that do not have the same level of processing memory as your standard laptop or desktop computer.

Even though you can have a mobile variant of your website which is trimmed down, some users will want to view your site in full HTML on their phone or PDA and a faster loading website will have a better chance of successfully loading on such devices.

As a webmaster, there are a number of free tools that you can use to improve the loading speed of your website. I have listed three of the more popular ones below:

Page Speed

Page Speed is an open-source add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser. It evaluates the speed of your website and gives you suggestions on how to improve your website speed.

Page Speed runs tests on the architectural configuration of both your web server and your website’s front end code. After running these tests, it gives you a report on your website speed and suggestions on how to improve the speed of your website.

Yslow

Yslow is a frée Firefox add-on from Yahoo integrated with Firebug software for website development. It displays statistics, an evaluation report and also provides suggestions on how best to improve the speed of your website using best practices.

Yslow comes integrated with other tools for performance evaluation, including Smush. Use it and JSLint to further enhance your website performance. Yslow is a Yahoo product but is still useful for avoiding the Google speed penalty.

SSEL Speed Tools

There is also a website speed check at Secret Search Engine Labs where you can get a quick answer on how big your webpage is and how fast it loads.

The Website Speed Quick Fix

There are several factors that affect page load speeds on your website, many of them technical and best solved by your webmaster or developer, but some changes you can do yourself as long as you have some experience with HTML and creating web pages.

Reduce the number, size and quality of images and use less audio, flash and Javascript. Reduce the length of the page by splitting a long page into several short pages. Strip the source code of redundant HTML, Javascript and CSS code that just slows things down. Don’t use images and other components that are linked live from other domains; instead use a copy on your server.

And don’t forget to keep your eyes on Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site performs compared to the competition.