seo
SEO Ponderings In Sydney, Australia #1 | TheBigSleep.co.uk
My recent Internet & SEO ponderings whilst looking for online marketing jobs and meeting the social media crowd here in Sydney, Australia. I will start with the two points that I have managed to document thus far – Connectivity and Webpage Load Times.
Broadband in Sydney/Australia – It’s not that good – Discuss?
We are connecting to the net in Australia; a country with one of the highest penetration rates for technology in the world (according to the Information Technology Take-Up Report In Australia Report). In another ITAF report, they also go on to show that Australia has one of the slowest average connection rates in the world despite this really high take up on technology (2008 ITIF Broadband Rankings).
We are connected to the internet using what is apparently a common means of connection here in Sydney, and throughout the rest of Australia – an [optus] mobile usb modem – I have been looking at the quicker mobile broadband packages, but many of the services basically uses the mobile phone network to connect and is not particularly sporty at the best of times. In fact – I used to get better and more reliable connectivity on a an bound 128k ISDN line 10 years ago – at least you wouldn’t have to disconnect and reconnect 5 or 6 times a day like we are doing here, and the connection rates were pretty stable.
We are struggling to use YouTube, BBC Online, Sky News – all of which I know are reliable and quick for us even over wireless back in the UK. We are just scraping a skype call but it is taking 3 or 4 attempts sometimes to get a line that isn’t delayed considerably.
The broadband providers here also have these ridiculous bandwidth caps – most of the advertised ones that I have seen thus far have been between 3 and 10 gig per month, I was speaking to someone the other night who was telling me on his ADSL 2 Line he has about 60Gig a month, but that is a reasonably expensive contract. Lets put this into perspective… iTunes movies are approximately 1.2 Gig – you will spend a day downloading a movie, and it will take 20% of your monthly bandwidth allocation? If you do want that 10 Gig per month with a reasonable connectivity rate, it won’t half cost you. I think that we will end up having something like this Big Pond “deal”. Expensive – so many people turn to the mobile broadband solutions. How on earth do the broadband providers expect to see online business develop when the bandwidth is so ridiculously expensive. I am told that this is due to the (virtual) monopoly by Telstra restricting the development of the networks, and then directly affecting everything else in terms of cost.
Australian Websites – Big, Heavy and Slow & SEO? (Part I)
Do I practice what I am about to preach with page sizes – I try to, but with a lot of my blogs and whatnot being image and text driven its not always possible – however, with many of the Australian sites that I am visiting I am getting over 15 second+ load time, and in a number of instances (especially agency websites) – over 20 seconds+ load time… Websites over here in Australia seem to be very heavy, image rich, media driven, with elements loading in the background as well as the foreground, resulting in high bandwidth usage (which costs a fortune), and slow page load times on what is a dog-awful connection (down to the connectivity both to internet and from ISP to server due to hosting in the US – go look at the trace routes!). It is all very well thinking that the only people who will view your agency or job search or funky social website will be on their corporate network when they view you site, but surely this consideration is factored in to client website design??? I am struggling to believe that it is given that I am now (albeit for a short period of time) representative of a good percentage of Australian net users, and now with the announcement of ISP filtering it isn’t going to get any better.
Ustilising something like Google page speed or FireBug (my personal prederence) might well be an interesting experiment for the user experience teams/webdesigners working on customer focused websites as integrating all of these applications and tools from third parties will slow your site down. If you trim page size down, it will not only mean that you are more likely to improve user experience, but, the Google gods do consider smaller page size to be one of the important elements. With Matt Cutts recent comments on Google Page Speed I am relatively convinced that a major “Red Bull Update” will result in quicker sites within the new/developing “Caffine” index, will see increases in SERP position.
With the advent of the mobile web, page sizes have been trimmed to a minimum – yet this doesn’t seem to have been considered to be as important in the website design field, and implementation of many of the projects that I have looked at over here in Australia demonstrate this.Many of the large agency websites (and their client websites) that I have analised, take more than 20 seconds to load – it is going to be impossible to compete with smaller competitors in organic search engine results. Competitors, who are able to build lightweight and optimised pages to run rings around the media rich agency built sites.
Is this lack of exposure on these keywords a problem? Yes, of course, Brand is important, but not necessarily as critical as SERP in these times – Google is trying to balance the Brand/Content scales all of the time – but position in specific markets is critical. Try doing a search on one of these most prominent AUS SEO/SEM terms: internet marketing, online marketing, online advertising (no large Sydney agency ranks well under any of these terms, despite the terms being the most searched SEO terms online) – why not – well lets be frank, it isn’t all that important to them as the majority of their business is with established clients and SEO would fall under the umbrella of larger projects or extended marketing activities. Why should they ensure that they are prominent in these areas? Well the small light weight sites of the SEO agencies are able to flex with Googles changes to ensure that they remain competitive on these terms. Yes, of course there are more terms than the ones that I have highlighted here – but how does this apply to the bigger picture? If a larger agency can’t get their own site into a competitive position in an area of business that they excel in – how do they achieve it with a client site? Well, quite simply they can’t.
If for example Agency #1 offers clients SEO and SEM solutions, should they be competing in the top ten of google for “Marketing Agency” or “Online Agency”? Until recently, I believed not, that clicks were the key indicator of SEO success, I am not so sure now. After spending nearly 18 months working for an agency in the UK who couldn’t really publicise their clients – they competed very strongly on key “marketing agency” and “online marketing agency” keywords, and got regular business from SME’s and larger clients looking to perform as well as the agency site on equally competitive terms. With smaller agencies dominating the SEO and Online Marketing results, many of the clients who they had were more than inclined to listen to what they said and advised based on this success alone – it was a strong leverage point when trying to focus big London web agencies and Internationally re known creative agencies away from the design aspects and back to what a website is about.
Online agencies need to be able to offer versatile solutions to their clients that accept that SEO is important enough to be part of the creative process (limiting page size & promoting text), as with the speed issue that I mentioned related to the broadband issues [above] the effects of ignoring it will hit the bottom line of any online business at some point. If not now – in the not so distant future with the advent of something like the changes that Matt Cutts has alluded to.
Australian Websites – Big, Heavy and Slow & SEO? (Part II)
Now, this leads me on to a second specific instance of on-site speed issues – I have noticed many Australian sites using Google AdWords and other banner servers (mostly US hosted if you again traceroute them) on their news/blog/websites – is the generation of a small amount of revenue worth the risk of losing a customer or reader – most of the page load freezes that I am getting are an AdWords or a media/banner server that is hindering the page load time – If I am experiencing this – then surely so are the general public? I have had it on a number of different connections that I have used now, and am bemused that no-one else has documented it or a least commented on blogs over here?