TED GOAS

Using Fontdeck? Pair is with Google’s WebFont Loader to improve perceived download times (and minimize FOUT).

Here’s how it works.

Pingdom tested the performance of a few popular URL shortening services. Short URLs promote portable content by making a link easier to pass around, this stuff is important!

How Website Performance Factors In

The overhead that an URL shortener adds is that, instead of going directly to a site, you first have to ask the servers of the URL shortening service where to go, and they will redirect you to the actual target site.

Someone’s finally paying attention to Feedburner again after years of neglect.

Ahhh… Feedburner

As Ryan Carson (of Carsonified) puts it:

At first it was an amazing god-send. Then it got bought by Google and promptly got locked in a closet and forgotten about. It’s finally been re-released with a shiny new interface and real-time tracking capabilities.

Check out the official announcement for more details about what’s new and what’s changed.

…at least do it proper! Make sure you game it enough to know whther or not it worked, but minimize your risk if (or when) something bad happens.

Joost de Valk roasts the Wordpress plugin BlogPress SEO. Even though it’s not meant to be funny, I though it to be an amusing read. It’s almost like a step-by-step process of what not to do when creating and marketing an SEO plugin.

Interesting article on Six Revisions about the differences how Bing and Google rank pages in their indexes.

Major Differences

1. Backlinks Are Less Important in Bing
2. PageRank Matters Less in Bing
3. Fresh Content Matters Less in Bing
4. Bing is More Flash Content Friendly
5. Inbound Anchor Text Matters More in Bing
6. Page Authority Matters More in Bing

If this is true, Bing indexes and ranks pages significantly different than Google! This is worth checking into to see how much truth there is in these claims.

Regardless I’m sure Bing isn’t out to copy Google. And it’s nice to have a few significant competitors out there to help benchmark Google’s web search and PageRank.

Also Notable

Similar to Google Webmaster tools, Bing now has its own version named Bing Toolbox. One more tool to use when launching and/or monitoring a site.

Time I start paying a little more attention to Bing, methinks.

Google In-Page Analytics. Seems like a more interactive Page Overlay with more context. After test driving this for only a few minutes, I can already tell this is going to be useful!

These days HTML5 Boilerplate is my starting point for any substantial web project. It has so many SEO and website performance considerations baked right in (more on that in a week or two).

index.html is a great start for markup. But like any template, there are tweaks and customizations to be considered. Design Reviver walks us through the file.

I’ll save you some time and let you in on the secret…

Earn Them!

SPAM commenting, directory submissions, even buying links - these don’t really cut it. To get good quality, relevant inbound links, you’ve got to put in some work.

Move over JPG, make way for… WebP? WebP is an image file format focused on improving compression of the lossy images like JPGs.

WebP aims to lower file sizes and in turn reduce download times while still retaining a certain level of quality.

Sitepoint notes that people want faster-loading sites and, currently, images make up a majority of many web page downloads. WebP seems like a natural fit.

Not So Fast

But don’t expect to see WebP popping up everywhere just yet. No major browsers support the format yet (though Google is working on a webkit solution for Chrome). Furthermore there are indications that file size reductions also cause somewhat noticeable quality reductions as well.

While it appears WebP has a few fatal flaws, the ball is rolling. Gonna keep an eye on this one…

A seriously great article covering existing microformats, using them in POSH, and what new microformats are included in HTML5. Includes a bunch of code examples with explanations.

Range Free Content

Microformats make data easier for machines to interpret and pass around. It all comes back to making content portable.

An excellent collection of the little things to consider when preparing and coding seo-friendly images for the web. In this case, seo-friendly is in regards to being found on image search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

While this is a pretty thorough list of factors to consider, two main themes ring clear: consistency and Moderation.

Consistency

The filename, alt-text and caption of an image of a website combine to form an impression of what the image is showing. For maximum impact these three factors should be aligned, containing the same or similar keywords

Moderation

…with so many factors to keep in mind it’s very easy to stuff keywords in everything and hope for the best. Needless to say, this is not desirable. So practice moderation and don’t stuff keywords everywhere. Relevance is key…

Logic would say that once a visitor lands on your site, it’s best to have what they’re looking for right on the page, front and center if possible.

But what if it’s not possible? Give them a wiff. If you give the visitor an indication that they’re on the right track, they’ll stick around a click as long as the trail doesn’t get too cold.

I first read about this in When Search Meets Web Usability, whose authors have long advocated the idea. Tyler Tate and H. Stefan Olafsson of TwigKit offer some ideas on how to amplify information scent on a website.