While the SEO community have been chattering away about page load times as a ranking factor in 2010, Google have quiely released new much needed Labs functionality into Webmaster Tools enhancing site performance reporting.

From the Google Webmaster Support page:

Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.

Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and check out the Labs link in the left hand navigation – you’ll find the site performance tools in there.

So, what does the tool look like?

Note from Patrick – this is what it says about Blogstorm:

On average, pages in your site take 7.3 seconds to load (updated on Nov 30, 2009). This is slower than 86% of sites.

The Labs tool reports on overall site performance (visible in the chart above) with a summary of individual URL performance. Like the Page Speed plugin, the Labs tool makes basic recommendations to webmasters on improvements they might make.
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Recently we discovered Tynt which allows web publishers to add links to content that is cut & pasted from their websites.

Today I’ve removed Tynt and added a better script that allows me to add a link to the story page and a link to my homepage with the anchor text of my choice. The script is called Link Building Pro and you can download it for free here.

If you want to test it just try copy & pasting some content from this page into your Wordpress editor or a Word document. There are a few options you can configure and the script is easy to edit if you want something a bit different.

One of the most exciting developments on the web in the last two years has been the increased ability to combine two or more technologies to create something new. We see this most in the Social space, of course, but overlaying data sets could lead to a dramatically increased understanding of the world we live in.

Today – after a delay of some months – I received my Hitwise (now called Experian Hitwise) newsletter. It is one of the very very that I actually remember signing up to. The other 100 a day never seem to get to my in-box now. Hitwise always use the newsletter to focus on on me as a UK user and choose an industry to give us some insight about the market share (in terms of traffic) about that industry and today chose to focus on the UK’s online property websites.
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With site speed apparently set to be a factor in the 2010 Google algorithm webmasters are looking for easy ways to speed up their sites and Google wants to help.

The latest Google Analytics code loads asynchronously allowing your page to load faster – download it here.
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Internet marketing firm Conductor has carried out some research (using Spyfu) to see what proportion of traffic to the top 10 big-box US retailers is coming from paid search compared to natural search.

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With Google Local results taking up more and more space in the search results local search is becoming (at least for Branded3) one of the key things we focus on for clients with multiple locations.

The Google Local algorithm isn’t the same as the main search algorithm but it does have similarities such as citations & reviews which work on the same principle as PageRank & links.
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Over the last few months Google has been really pushing local search in the UK (with plans to push it even more) and we are finding Local Business Results increasingly creeping into generic keywords such as mobile phones.

Today I thought it would be interesting to take the “mobile phones” search results and see what percentage of the page each element takes up. The results are below and you can click on the screenshot to see a full size version of the whole page.

The top 10 organic results now only account for 21% of the page with local listings taking up 9.3% – almost the same as the Adwords ads which take up 14.3%. Just under 50% of the page is either white space or navigation links.

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Via the excellent ABtests.com comes a case study detailing how Crystal Ski were able to increase homepage conversion rates by 50% and decrease bounce rates by 20% by implementing a new design.

I think it’s really interesting to look at these case studies just to see how amazing a design change can be.
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Facebook really is first among equals when it comes to social networks. Worldwide around 500,000 new people sign-up every day and the average UK user spends three solid days a year on the site.

The network is a strange mix of public and private, and besides advertising those with pages for their business or organisation need to think creatively about how to attract fans.

Here are a few ideas you can put into practice very quickly and form a good basis for Facebook marketing campaigns.
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