Adventures in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Site Loading Speed

So the Mean Greeting Cards site is live, and I've been working on all aspects of SEO. For those who don't know, SEO is the practise of optimizing your website so that Google (And all the others, but mostly google) not only knows you exist but has faith that your site isn't a pile of garbage. This optimization helps with your page rank, how you show up in search results and with getting a higher quality score in the advertising pay per click mediums.

For this article I'm focusing mostly on Magento (by Varien, google it) shopping cart as it's the best open source cart I could find. Magento has a number of SEO features, but does seem to be loading a little on the slow side. A cart store like mine shouldn't take more than a second or two to load. So I decided to delve a little deeper into the code and site. Please remember, I am an amateur at web design, so while some of this may seem like givens for you professionals, noobs need helpful articles too.

The first thing I did was a google search for website speed. You'll find a couple of speed test sites which gives you tips on where your problems are. The first result was the best, and so I got the site analyzed.

Low and behold over half my website landing page size was images. So I trundle off to The Gimp (Open Source version of Photoshop, it's awesome because it's free) and begin dropping my image sizes by reducing the quality. With .jpg files it's easy because you can just reduce the quality. With .gifs it's a bit more involved because you need to set the maximum number of colors for the image, which can be tricky if you don't know how. The Gimp has an option under the image menu -> mode menu and hit indexed mode.

So I do this to my logo images, and the slider images I have up and my site dropped in size by about 40%. A good start if I do say so myself.

The next thing to add to the magento install is the Fooman Speedster extension. This extension combines and compresses your .js (javascript) and .css (Cascading Style Sheets).

I run the server under the Wolfpaw Services co-location in Edmonton. We're debating getting it upgraded as my box might be a bit shy in spec to be a decent webserver.

Kryss Out
www.callousgreetings.com