advanced technical seo smx advanced london 2011

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

m.beijk@onetomarket.nl 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: