Assorted SEO Tips

Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings

While slow page load times won't negatively impact your rankings, fast load times may have a positive effect. Load times can be significantly improved by paying attention to the graphics included on a page, i.e. ensuring you don't include too many and ensuring they are saved at an optimum size. This usually implies GIF format. Drupal has a few performance boosting tricks under Admin, Site Configuration, Performance. It can build and maintain a cache to reduce database accesses and reduce bandwidth by compressing CSS files, Javascript and HTML pages. You can test the speed of your site at this tool from Pingdom.

Compressing a sites Java Script and CSS files can also significantly reduce load times. Drupal has several modules to help you with this. We use CSS Gzip for the CSS and Javascript Aggregator to minimize (remove white space) and compress Javascript

Fast loading pages will, of course, effect humans as well. If a page takes a long time to load the user might well hit the back button and if it loads quickly the user is more likely to click more links on your site.

Don't stuff your pages with Internal Links

Excessively repeating keywords in anchor text or included lots of similar links, especially in a page footer, can be seen in a negative light by a search engine. The guideline here, as always with SEO, is just include what would seem natural to a human visitor.