advanced technical seo smx advanced london 2011
DESCRIPTION
Presentation on day 1 of SMX Advanced London 2011 in the session: What Really Matters in Technical SEO; presentation deck on speed and performance by Martijn Beijk.TRANSCRIPT
Speed & PerformanceWhat’s really important in technical SEO?
Presented by
@martijnbeijk
Martijn Beijk SEO & Web Analytics Consultant
5 years of international experience in online marketing
International speaker, blogger, writer, lecturer at universities in the Netherlands.
Maximizing traffic and conversions a.o.
What, where?
Why speed mattersDatabase optimisationWebservers explainedWhy investigate alternatives?
Starting a successful campaignWhy speed matters placeholderSpeed
Starting a successful campaignWhy Speed Matters
Google announced: “Let’s make the web faster”
• Google Public DNS
• Page speed webmaster tools
• Page speed for Chrome
• Page speed online
• V8, WebP
• Mod_pagespeed for Apache
• Page speed API
• Page speed load times in Google Analytics
• OH: “Page speed is a ranking factor”
Page SpeedAPI & Analytics
Google Analytics Page speed report
If you are using Wordpress
Already in W3 Total Cache Wordpress Plugin
Snippet included in Yoast’s Google Analytics Wordpress plugin
• Available in new Google Analytics interface
• Dive into most critical pages (highest load time)
• Conversion rate?
• Correct problems
Google Analytics Page speed report
If you are using Wordpress
Already in W3 Total Cache Wordpress Plugin
Snippet included in Yoast’s Google Analytics Wordpress plugin
• Available in new Google Analytics interface
• Dive into most critical pages (highest load time)
• Conversion rate?
• Correct problems
Starting a successful campaignDatabase Optimisation
Database Optimization
Starting a successful campaignDatabase Optimisation (business case)
• Expensive queries kill load time (5 sec and up)
• Optimisation reduced load time < 3 sec
• Webmaster Tools detected large number of new URLs
• Filters were getting indexed; use robots=noindex or canonical
Starting a successful campaignDatabase Optimisation
• Expensive Queries should have indexes
• Log slow queries
• Watch your JOIN clauses
• “Lazy Programmers Syndrome”
• MySQL EXPLAIN query
• MySQL: MyISAM or InnoDB
http://bit.ly/mysql_engine
• Use MySQL Memory Tables!
Starting a successful campaignWebservers explained placeholder
Webservers explained
Starting a successful campaignMarket share for top servers across all
domainsAugust 1995 – March 2011
Source: Netcraft, webserver survey march 2011
Starting a successful campaignMarket Share across million busiest
sitesSeptember 2008 – March 2011
Source: Netcraft, webserver survey march 2011
Starting a successful campaignServer Hamster
Starting a successful campaignBest practices
• Do not forget your application servers
(e.g. Gunicorn, Tomcat, JBoss)
• Prefer memory caching over disk caching (I/O is slow)
• Use Load Balancing or Proxy Pass to other server
• Set HTTP headers for different types of content
• Expires header, Etag, strip cookies
• Look into alternative webservers
Starting a successful campaignVirtual Host vs .htaccess
• Using .htaccess should be avoided at all costs
• Virtual Hosts run from memory
• .htaccess is I/O request per folder
VS
Starting a successful campaignBenchmark
• Use software like ApacheBench, Siege (available on any *nix machine)
• See how different types of content are performing
• Do not run on a production server : - )
Starting a successful campaignVarnish Cache / ProxyVarnish
Not in cache
Cached results
Starting a successful campaignWhy investigate alternatives
• Super fast & solid alternative solutions
• Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook use them!
• Make your scalable VPS perform even better
• CDN not always necessary
Take aways
• If you are on a shared webhosting package you are not taking your business seriously
• Quality of programming code (speed!)
• Speed of DB Queries
• Use caching in memory whenever available
• Leverage existing tools for your platform
• Running Wordpress? http://bit.ly/speedupwordpress
Lessons learned & takeaways
Martijn BeijkSEO & Web Analytics consultant
[email protected] Twitter: @martijnbeijk
Take aways
The Stig (opening slide): http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamcreator/5688900923
Oracle HQ:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dahlstroms/4140459965/
Datacenter
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arthur-caranta/2925352521/
Image credits: