My first job in search engine optimisation was in 1997. So much has changed - SEO is more nuanced than ever before, with every character, every comma having an effect.
In addition to writing about SEO and speaking at various conferences, I enjoy actioning it myself too. There's nothing quite like sending a client a graph showing their organic traffic skyrocketing - without them having to increase their monthly spend.
Heading tags are often really poorly used on the web. It’s easy to think of them as an easy way to set your font size, but you’d be making a mistake if you did.
I’ve posted a blog to Digital Kiwis about heading tags and SEO, have a read.
The tl;dr version is really simple. First and foremost heading tags should be approached with SEO in mind, but there’s nothing wrong with playing around with your font styles to make sure your key text is used as headings – even if it’s not your largest text.
Here’s a blog over on Digital Kiwis about the time I halved a website’s loading time by simply removing four lines of CSS code.
This isn’t a copy and paste solution, but helps illustrate how paying attention to every aspect of a project can really make a difference.
I’ve got a post over at Digital Kiwis dispelling some of the myths I hear a lot surrounding WordPress and speed.
The tl;dr version is that it can be very fast, but ideally you need to have a professional sort that out for you.
The longer, full version however, is much more interesting and also a bit sweary.
This is a goodie.
If you’ve ever run a Google Page Speed test and wondered what on earth the results actually meant, you probably didn’t end up scrolling all the way to the bottom of the report.
But right there, at the bottom, is the option to “Download optimized image, JavaScript, and CSS resources for this page.”
Within that zipped file is a folder with all the images from that page you just tested, optimised to Google’s required standard.
It’s sweet, but comes with a couple of caveats. One being it gives you all the images in a single folder and WordPress sites usually want them in a variety of folders by month, so that can take a bit of unraveling.
Also bear in mind Google’s compression algorithm tends to do terrible things to text in graphics. So best not use this method for any images with text in them.
But generally speaking it’s a really useful way to take “Optimize images” off your Page Speed to-do list.
An increasing number of sites are using Parallax Scenes, it’s a cool technique where you layer images on top of each other so they all move independently at different speeds.
You can see an example on the homepage of the New Zealand digital marketing firm I work with. I’ve made a fair few examples recently, often with several layers to good effect.
But in my work optimising sites and speeding them up I regularly come across websites that are unnecessarily slow loading with these. They’re always going to be pretty large because transparent images need to be in PNG format which is simply a much less efficient format than JPG.
But there are a couple of tips I have to really make them fly.
Using those techniques I was able to optimise the example I linked to above to be less than 400kB for the entire parallax scene, including the code for it.