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.
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.
By 15 hours.
This image is the search engine results page for a post I made on our Digital Kiwis site, 5 minutes after I posted it. (Yes, I manage to get new or updated content live on search engines almost immediately after they’re published. Behold my SEO!)
It’s the results from a search performed in New Zealand, on google.co.nz, for an NZ hosted website about a local company.
Yet it says it was posted 15 hours previously! I’ve mentioned this at conferences before, but Google really struggles with New Zealand as a nation (for so many searches if you don’t add ‘nz’ at the end of them you’ll see Australian results) but this seems like it’s just plain lazy.
As most of my web presences get more professional (Digital Kiwis, case in point!) it’s important I keep a space that, well, fits my bare-bones ‘look what I made on Notepad’ aesthetic.
By way of introduction I’m Peter Mahoney, and I do a hell of a lot of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and digital marketing.