Page Speed

I just downloaded and installed Page Speed which is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on (note, if you do not have Firebug Add-on installed the Page Speed Add-on will not work). With Page Speed I can evaluate the performance of my client’s’ web pages and I’ll receive a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance which I can send to my clients on how to improve their pages.

What’s the big deal about speed, right? I have two words for you, Matt Cutts. Let me share with you a couple of quotes from a series of interviews he did with WebProNews.

The first quote, "I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about 'how do I have my site run fast,' how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?'"

The second quote, "No. Relevancy is the most important. If you have two sites that are equally relevant (same backlinks...everything else is the same), you'd probably prefer the one that's a little bit faster, so page speed can be an interesting theory to try out for a factor in scoring different websites. But absolutely, relevance is the primary component, and we have over 200 signals in our scoring to try to return the most relevant, the most useful, the most accurate search result that we can find. That's not going to change."

Now that I’ve peaked your curiosity I bet you’re wondering how Page Speed works. Page Speed performs several tests on a site's web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices from Google known to enhance web page performance.

The tool is simple to use and if nothing else you’re going to improve the speed of your site. But I have to tell you I think speed is going to be playing a larger and larger role in the coming years for higher rankings in Google’s search results.

Rank Checker - A Free SEO Tool

As online marketers, we are always looking for the latest and greatest tools to help our clients stay ahead of the competition. This week I came across Rank Checker which is a Firefox extension (an add on to the Firefox web browser) that allows you to upload your keyword lists and run reports to check your website rankings in Google (including international), Live and Yahoo. This tool is designed to be quick and it takes only a few minutes to install. What I like about it is that once you run your keywords report, you can verify you positions in the search results by double clicking on the URL - keep in mind that if you are logged into your Google account it shows personalized results which tend to show better results than what they really are. To avoid this, you can check under preferences "don't show Google personalized results if any." Did I mention this tools is free?! it is and you can also export the data to a CSV file.

Is Your Website Cross Browser Compatible?

If you have never even thought about this then you may be in for a surprise shock. Unless you paid a well qualified designer who knows his XHTML and CSS chances are there may be 2 or more things off in your website as far as the aesthetics look. Not everyone in the world uses the same browser as you do and each Internet Browser uses different technology or different ways to translate and display your web page so the result will be a nice look page on Firefox or Safari and a mess web page on IE7. I will recommend to try to accommodate you web site to looks good up til IE4-5 and Firefox 3.

There are a few websites that are on the web that can help you determine if your website is truly compatible with every browser from Safari to Mozilla’s Firefox all the way to Google Chrome.

The First is called “Browser Shots” and basically it runs approx on 50 servers with each running a different browser of your site and sending you a snapshot of it.The second website is well known as you may have seen it in the footer tagged on some websites. It’s called Markup Validation service by W3C

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The official Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in twenty-four hours goes to

The official Mozilla Blog has confirmation that Mozilla Firefox 3 now holds the official Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in twenty-four hours. On Download Day, there were 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox 3 between 6:16pm UTC/GMT on Tuesday 17th June 2008 and 6:16pm UTC/GMT on Wednesday 17th June 2008.

It's so amazing that a couple years ago when FireFox was launched, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the market with a whopping 95 percent share. Now Firefox has 18 percent of the market and Apple's Safari has another 6 percent.

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Help Firefox Break a World Record

Mozilla is attempting to set the world record for most downloads in a day when they launch Firefox 3 on June 17th. A quick search on guinessworldrecords.com had no information on the current record holder for most downloads in a day. Firefox has been my primary browser for sometime now and I will be part of the download. Firefox has even set up a website to help spread the news, where you can pledge to download the program, to date over 1 million individuals and counting have pledged. Also on the site, Firefox has set up numerous banners and buttons to further help spread the word.