E-Biz Booster Blog

Seriously. I am in. You remember that I did not write that positive about Google Sidewiki. Well with Google Wave this is different.

It definitely pays off to be active in online forums. Last week one of this online friends asked,

“Anybody wants an invitation
into the \/\/ave?”

Since I was among the first who virtually had raised there hands I got one of those precious nominations and got in within a couple of days.

Usually I am not excited so much about becoming a beta tester of anything and Google calls the current stage of Wave a Pre-Beta. Sounds worse, doesn't it. But actually I am surprised it really feels great. I was not among those in the early rush for Gmail accounts. Started to use Gmail seriously not before 2009. But the loooooong video from Google presented Wave got me hooked immediately.

So now I am in. And I am even more excited. Let me tell you about a couple of prerequisites.

Prerequisits

(1) Obviously you need an invitation currently.

Google wants to slowly build up a base of about 100,000 users and fine-tune their infrastructure as well as completing features that we have heard of in the video but not yet seen in the preview beta version.

Now I have a confession to make.

I am guilty

But first, let's look at a fun video.

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After my post Is Google Sidewiki Evil? I simply ignored the subject altogether and had disabled this function in my Google toolbar.

Yesterday, I noticed two very good posts with additional insights, good user comments, and I also added my mustard (as Germans would say) to the conversation and to the Google Help Forum as well.

But first things first.
Not many people are talking about this:

Google Sidewiki API

At least there is a documented API. All details about the Google Sidewiki API (↑) on Google's site. Here is what a developer can do with it.
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It just comes to my mind that I am writing posts about web site development issues only when something bothers me. Like the DNS problems with my ISP that I had in July this year.

It might not only be me who has noticed that many “Social Media Rich Web Sites” and blogs load very slowly. Even in a modern browser on a new computer.

The first guess is:

“It's all the widgets and external components they load.”

But it is not only how much you load. It is also about in what order you load it … and from what servers … So what do we usually have to deal with:

• many images
• various CSS style sheets
• Javascript files for improved navigation and AJAX trickery within the site
• Javascript widgets and iframes for interaction with other sites
• Flash files
• Java applets
• … etc.

The browser has to request each file individually. Some files are cached in your browser and will be downloaded only once (if your web server is setup correctly).

Then there are other cases where your web server might have to wait for data from third party web sites before it can complete to build a dynamic web page and deliver it to the browser.

The richness of Web 2.0 doesn't make it necessarily easier to be a great webmaster. It's true that widgets can be dropped into a site and add substantial interactivity to it in matter of minutes, but optimizing a site for performance hasn't become much easier.

A lot of different elements to deal with.

Examples:

• affiliate banners or affiliate data feeds
• RSS news feeds
• embedded video and audio content
• Digg, Reddit, and other social media votes
• Twitter, Facebook and Disqus widgets
• User avatars like from myblogcatalog.com or gravatar.com
• etc.

The list is really endless.

And last but not least the HTML part of the page itself (this one single file) could be already pretty big by itself. Or don't you have 20+ comments on your average blog post?

And don't forget, if you are running a content management system like a blog all this content is created on the fly out of a database. (Or are you using Wordpress Super Cache already — or whatever it is called.)

You will notice the longer you have been working on your website the slower it usually gets.

Time to speed up your web site again

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If you have similar habits, then you will also frequently bookmark blog posts, articles, funny, sad, educational, in short interesting stories. My bet is you don't only bookmark them for yourself but you also want to share them with your friends, colleagues, with smaller, larger communities or with the World. At least that part of the World which has noticed you exist.



For quite a long time I have been using the Sharethis plugin for Firefox, and I also have put the Sharethis widget on my blog (this one) and other websites I control. I don't recall when it happened exactly, but I think it has been a couple of weeks ago, when I received an email from Sharethis.com that said, …
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Finally following up my previous blog post about the SEO improvements on this, my E-Biz Booster Blog. I promise I'll keep this post as short as possible and to the point. And I must warn you. This post might be a bit straight forward and advanced. If you have questions leave a comment and I'll be happy to explain what needs to be explained in further detail. At the end of this blog post I refer to other bloggers who are going a similar route. Kind of social proof that I have moved in the right direction with the latest changes in the inner workings here.

I originally stated, “I don't care about rewriting the short versions of the URL.” That means if someone typed for example, http://blogdev1.fcon21.biz/230/ for an article about email marketing tips, into the browser or clicked a corresponding link the navigation bar of his browser showed exactly that URL. Not anymore.

I argued it does not matter as long as the content is what the user is looking for and the search engines can use the meta information for the canonical URL from the HTML Head section.

Well, that was theory.

Rewrite non-canonical versions of your post URL

Not all search engines and other types of robots are taking advantage of the meta information for the canonical URL at this point.

I noticed problems with Google Adsense when requesting a particular page with using the shortcut URL. The AdSense bot did not know what the page is about and served no or totally off-topic ads in many cases. I knew this is not very good. So I needed to fix this problem.

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I implemented a couple of SEO related (search engine optimization) changes on this blog. But I did not stop there. I introduced some new features for my readers as well.

As a result and the side-effect of it, the 10 or 15 latest blog posts have been re-published on the RSS feed with ever slightly changing URLs. I had the RSS feed turned off today to minimize the effect this had on Feedburner, and your RSS blog subscriptions.

I hope you can forgive me that faux pax. I wrote about those side-effects in the original article where I go in detail over the background for the SEO changes.

The main SEO changes revisited

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