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This is a very good question that one of our readers asked us to address. Website speed is an important factor to not only SEO, but to increasing conversions.

When SE spiders come to your site to index it’s content they typically have a very limited amount of time to index your website. The faster your server response time the more information the spiders will get. One way around this for Google is to use the Google Sitemaps utility. Google Sitemaps is an XML file that you place on your server that tells Google where all of you pages can be found and how often they are updated. I suspect the other major SE’s are working on something similar, but we will have to wait.

Buyer conversion rates can also be affected dramatically by the speed of your server. The longer your website takes to process pages the longer your clients have to change their minds about making a purchase with you.

How do I find out what my speed is?
An easy way to see how well your server ranks in comparison to all other servers is through the Alexa Toolbar. Using the toolbar anyone can click on the more info button to read some interesting statistics on their website.

Comit Hosting is an affordable way to increase your websites visibility. Our servers are in the top 10% in terms of server speed and are SEO Certified!

Good Luck,
Spencer Hoyt

People used to purchase link text ads based on the website PageRank (PR), the number of outbound links on that page was very important to them.
The reason for this was that the available PageRank a web page has to vote is voted evenly to all pages. The internal pages for the most part vote the PR back so those are not considered.

Now that PageRank is held by most SEO experts to have little or no ranking weight, I am asked from time to time by clients if this is an issue of the past.

When you are purchasing text link ads one of your main concerns should be click thought traffic. With this in mind it only makes sense that all other things being equal a page that has 20 links will give you more click though than a page that has 100 links.

Last month I blogged on SEO Tools That Analyze the Value of a Text Link Ad and I gave a list of 13 items that determines the value of a link. Here is the list again for your viewing convenience.

What make a link valuable?
1. Inbound site traffic and page traffic.
2. Inbound dot gov and dot edu links.
3. Click though traffic you get from the page.
4. Site in DMOZ and Yahoo directory.
5. Age of domain and time of domain being used (longer the better).
6. Inbound links shown to that page on Yahoo (link:http:www.domain.ext/page.html).
7. Ranking of page for the keywords it is optimized for.
8. Relevance of theme of site and page to your site and page.
9. Alexa ranking (lower is better).
10. Deep link compared to home page links.
11. Location of link.
12. Length of allowed description text.
13. PR of page (still matters a bit).

Text is one of the most important items when it comes to Website Optimization. Search engines can’t read things like pictures and flash so it is extremely important to have lots of text on your website. Most website design firms build great looking websites, but most web design companies employ graphic artist as their web designers. Graphic artist tend not to use much text.

To be truly effective a website must contain about 500 words of text per page! Most people run when they hear that they will need to write 500+ words per page, but don’t worry. Comit Technologies has copywriters to help you with your writing troubles.

Our specialist not only fill your pages with keyword rich text, they make your website read natural to your site visitors. Most people tend to stuff their website text with keywords with the hopes of achieving higher website rankings, but what they may gain in higher rankings they lose in sales because their wbsite turns off potential customers.

Examples of effective website text can be found on Pixus Digital Printing. Pixus produces short run digital prints from Banners to Backlits and has been a happy customer of Comit Technologies for over 3 years.

People always ask me “What is the best way to build the ranking of my website?” As many of us in the SEO industry already know, you can’t narrow this down to 1 topic. I refer to my previous post on the 3 keys to successful SEO to get a general answer, but I would like to point out another important fact that many people overlook.

Fresh Content is King
But how do I generate all this content you ask? It’s simple! RSS and Blogs are 1 way to increase traffic to your website since the SE’s love it. RSS and blogs are the most search engine friendly way to add content and luckily it is one of the easiest ways to generate content. Search around and try out some of the thousands of programs on the net and give them a try.

Good Luck,
Spencer Hoyt