While there are several technical things that you can do to speed up your pages this article is aimed at the person that either can’t or doesn’t want to get involved in that level.

So without further ado, the easiest way to speed up your pages are (in no particular order) :-

1. Make sure that images are at a resolution of 72 or 96dpi, computer screens can’t display high resolutions so just because your camera has produced a photo for your website at 300 or 600dpi doesn’t mean that you should use it. Many image editing software packages allow you to change the resolution.
2. Make sure that images on the page are at the size they should be displayed – don’t put an image on the page that is 2,000 x 1,500 pixels in size and then re-size it in the code for the page to 200 x 150 – the visitor has to download the full sized image and then re-size it, so be kind and re-size it for them. I once looked at a site for a client that broke both of the “rules” above using a photo of a product on the home page that was a total of 4Mb in size – by changing the resolution and resizing the image before it was put on the page if brought the image size down to 120Kb (3% of the original size) and speeded up the page dramatically – this had a side effect of people staying on the page rather than giving up and leaving the site.
3. If y0u are writing your own pages using an editor, look at the code that is generated and remove any blank lines and extra spaces in the code. This may only save one or two kb of data but every little helps when speeding up pages.
4. If you have created your page by copying and pasting the content from a word processing package such as Word you need to be aware that often this results in extra unwanted code being pasted in at the same time – removing this can be time consuming but the results are often a good saving in file size.
5. If you are using styles to alter the look of the text, maybe by changing the font size or type face try to put the styles into an external style sheet (.css file). Although this is an extra call to the server by the browser for the first page the next page on your site that uses the same style sheet will not have to load it into the browser thus speeding up the 2nd page)
6. When creating any style sheets use the same rules regarding white space and blank lines as html files (3 above). I have worked on many style sheets where the original creator put 20 or more blank lines between sections – this not only slowed down the loading of the file but also made it more difficult to edit.

So there you are, 6 easy ways to speed up your web page, helping the search engines load the page, making it faster for visitors and also saving you bandwidth when sending the pages to visitors.

“How do you know all this stuff?” someone asked.?“I use the Google search engine all the time and it leads me to places and information that I would not normally have discovered.” she replied.

Many people now place blind faith in the information that they read on the Internet without questioning how much of the information is fact and how much is opinion. I “asked” Google “Who are the Largest 5 Employers in the World” and received a range of different “answers/opinions” to the same question.

The Top 2 results were both from WikiAnswers, one focusing on public company employment , the other including Governments as an employer.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_are_the_five_largest_employers_in_the_world

1 Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), China, 2,300,000

2 Wal-Mart Stores, United States, 1,800,000 employees

3 Indian State Railways, India, 1,400,000

4 National Health Service (NHS), UK, 1,300,000

5 Deutsche Post, Germany, 502,545 employees

Why do you think this helpful information was published ?

• Is it there to educate the masses ?
• Is it there to harvest traffic and generate advertising revenue?
• Is it there to do both?

You decide !

The Google Caffeine update incororpates real-time social media, blogging and Tweet results with an improved Google ranking algorithm. It is believed that the new algorithm places more emphasis on the quality of links rather than the quantity.

Hiperactive have noticed increases and decreases in client visitor traffic over recent months and we are updating clients sites where appropriate to ensure best practice guidelines are followed. Interestingly search terms with greater than four words are being found more frequently.

A search in Google for Financial News returned some curious results with EFinancialNews in first place ahead of the Financial Times, Reuters and Bloomberg whilst the real time results were listed at the bottom of the page down in position 10. When the “pages from the UK” option was selected in Google the real time results disappeared.

You can read Dave’s excellent article in full?here.

More than 43,000 visitors found the site via Internet search engines and the Lea on The Solent Infant School was the most frequently found school.

Click here to see a Google Map of other schools in the Lee-on-The-Solent area.

Other highlights:

• Searches for Montessori schools remain as popular as ever
• Increasing number of searches based on Postcodes
• Gillingham, Aldershot & Walton Upon Thames were popular town searches this month

Book mark us and come back regularly and please feel free to add any comments, tips or hints that you may want to share too.