Yahoo Search Engine

Website Speed Analysis Tools

Google Page Speed & Yahoo Yslow speed analysis tools Speed is a crucial aspect in providing a pleasant user experience to visitors of your site. It ensures that a visitor’s limited attention span and time are spent on actual content and not wasted waiting for images and scripts to load. Studies have shown that users will not tolerate more than a 4 second load time. If your site fails to offer a quick response, your users will leave.   In terms of SEO, Google is hinting at using Page Speed score in its ranking algorithm. As developers and marketers look to optimize their sites, page speed should be among the top optimizations to consider. Two of the major speed analysis tools are Google’s Page Speed and Yahoo’s YSlow. Both require Firefox and the Firebug add-on. Here’s a run down of each: Page Speed “When you profile a web page with Page Speed, it evaluates the page’s conformance to a number of different rules. These rules are general front-end best practices you can apply at any stage of web development. We provide documentation of each of the rules here, so whether or not you run the Page Speed tool – maybe you’re just developing a brand new site and aren’t ready to test it, you can refer to these pages at any time. We give you specific tips and suggestions for how you can best implement the rules and incorporate them into your development process.” Read more about Google Page Speed YSlow “YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.” Read more about Yahoo! YSlow What’s the difference? Page Speed and YSlow generally offer the same service, however there are differences in their calculations. Each service analyzes a page using a set of rules that they believe are most relevant to page speed and performance. Most of the rules overlap or are very similar to each other, but in general your scores should be comparable. These are tools that you can use to see how your website currently ranks on a scale of 1-100 and you can also find out your web page load time speed.  The idea here is that you can see what Google and Yahoo think of your sites load times and if you have a low score below 90, then you probably need to do something about it.  Otherwise you very well might have a site that is loading super slow and that can be a huge turn off to anyone visiting your site and if they have to wait more then 5 seconds, then they will usually leave. GETTING YOUR SITE BETTER GOOGLE PAGE SPEED SCORES & LOAD TIMES So I will be showing you some examples of legal sites and how I have helped improve the Google page speed score from a 60 to a 95 and helped increase the load time from 10 seconds to 2.5 seconds.  Many lawyers dont even realize that they have super slow sites and might be losing potential clients because of it.   If your legal site is running slow, contact us today for assistance. [si-contact-form form=’1′]

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Yahoo Sues Facebook For Patent Infringement

As is being widely reported, Yahoo filed a patent lawsuit against Facebook today in US Federal Court in the Northern District of California. At the center of the litigation are a wide range of claims that cover advertising, the news feed, messaging, social networking and privacy, among others. Here’s a key paragraph from the complaint: It reads, “For much of the technology upon which Facebook is based, Yahoo got there first . . .” No dollar amount is specified in the damages portion of the complaint. Presumably Yahoo thinks this IP is worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. AllThingsD reports that the decision to sue was made chiefly by new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson — over the objections of many Yahoo personnel internally — and signals a new more aggressive attitude at Yahoo. For its part Facebook says that it learned about the claims and the suit “in the media,” suggesting that it wasn’t approached by Yahoo before the litigation was filed. However the New York Times reported that the companies did meet “in person” at the end of February to discuss the claims. What’s Motivating Yahoo? Why is Yahoo suing Facebook? The prevailing suggestion is that Yahoo can no longer compete directly and so is suing to obtain “revenue” it is losing in the market. Or maybe it’s suing out of a kind of “resentment” that Facebook has usurped its position as the largest display advertising site online. Neither is accurate. Yahoo likely sees a potentially large opportunity in the litigation. The timing is inconvenient for Facebook, which is about to go public. However I’m sure the timing is quite calculated by Yahoo. You may remember that Yahoo sued Google and others for patent infringement over AdWords (based on the Overture patents granted in 2001). Google was also just about to go public and settled with Yahoo, agreeing to issue 2.7 million shares of stock in exchange for a perpetual license to the IP and an agreement to dismiss the case. Yahoo later sold the stock for a total of roughly $1.5 billion. Lessons of the Google Litigation That amount now seems like a pittance vs. the billions in revenues that Google is reaping off AdWords. Had Yahoo asked for and obtained an annual license fee it could be getting a substantial “annuity” from Google. Yahoo also sued Quigo (now part of AOL) and FindWhat in the first half of the last decade using the same Overture patents. So the Yahoo action against Facebook isn’t unprecedented and may have nothing to do with “sour grapes.” Many if not most of the claims probably have merit and there will probably be a settlement rather than a trial (just a guess). The IPO puts more pressure on Facebook to settle in the near term. That’s undoubtedly something that Yahoo considered in the timing of this litigation. The question is really not whether Facebook will settle but whether Yahoo, having theoretically learned the lesson of the Google IP settlement, tries to get ongoing licensing revenue from the social network. Read More at Marketing Land

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Getting Your Legal Site Ready for the Bing/Yahoo Merger

Yahoo announced that the organic search results on Yahoo will be powered by Bing beginning in August/September. Yahoo is already testing Bing results on some result pages and its only a matter of time before the current Yahoo organic results are replaced by the Bing results. Is the Yahoo-Bing change relevant to your legal website? YES because the bottom line is that both Yahoo and Bing produce a good amount of traffic and according to the latest comScore data, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010. Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That’s a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month. So if you can get your site listed highly in the Bing organic listings, then that will carry over to Yahoo and it should produce a good amount of traffic to your site. HOW TO OPTIMIZE FOR BING Optimizing your web site for Bing.com is not that much different from optimizing your web pages for Google. Just like Google, Bing requires optimized web pages, good content and high quality inbound links from other sites if you want to see your website in the top 1o results for keywords related to your legal practice. The difference will be the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.  In some cases you might be ranked well at both Google and Bing but not for all keywords.  So its going to take some expermenting to see what works the best and here are some quick tips. Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing. If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results. Use the webmaster tools at Bing and register your site and also a sitemap. They also have a bunch of good Search engine optimization tips for your site. Its time to recognize that Google is not the only search engine out there and that BING is for real and it makes sense to try and get your site ranked well at Bing in addition to Google. If your law firm needs assistance with their SEO marketing campaigns or if you want us to help you get good Bing SEO organic rankings for your legal site, contact us today.

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