So, after a lot of rumours and behind the scenes testing, Google has come out and made it official – the speed of your website is now one of the (over 200) factors taken into account when ranking your site in the search results.

Cue widespread panic and a lot of shark-like activity on the part of shadier SEO companies – but reading the details, both on google’s official webmaster blog and a reflection by Matt Cutts should put your average site owner’s nerves at ease. Speed is a factor, but it’s a very,very small factor (less than 1% of search results are affected). In fact, this new development has already been rolled out, without any widespread outcry across the net about sites falling down dramatically in the serps (search engine results pages).

So don’t panic, but do take note. Now is as good a time as any to check up how your site is actually doing speed-wise, and to consider making changes to improve the performance. It will certainly be a plus for your visitors, and may have the added bonus now of helping you gain an advantage on your competitors online – because all things being equal (which, given the amount of factors involved in ranking, is never the case – but you get the point), if the only difference between your sites is speed, the faster one will now be ranked higher.

How to go about checking the speed of your site:

There are plenty of free tools out there to benchmark the speed of your site. A good starting point is  Google webmaster tools itself, which now includes a section (under google labs / site performance), which will give you a rough idea of how fast your site is, and make recommendations on how to increase the speed.

If you’re using firefox you can download a page  speed checking add-on tool.

You can get some tips on speeding up performance here (at the yahoo developers network), or here (at Nettuts+)

But above all else, remember, it’s the content on your site that is the #1 factor. Making sure that it’s delivered in a quick and attractive manner makes sense, but if you’re content is crap it doesn’t matter how fast it loads.

We’ve already pointed out one horrendous experience had by a self-publishing author (who paid his publisher over ten-times the going rate to register his preferred domain name, and then found that they had actually registered it to themselves). Browsing about we’ve come across another mistake that authors/novelists using self-publishing companies can make.

They presume that, because their book is published to a high standard, their self-publishing company is the best place to go to when setting up a website for their book.

Any decent self-publishing company has various extra services available for their authors, ranging from business cards through to marketing, and inevitably web design. But are they taking advantage of their client’s inexperience to offer them an over-priced deal?

Let’s take a look at one of the bigger self-publishing site’s web design offer for their authors. They offer 3pages, graphic design, 2 rounds of revision, and html javascript for a whopping $600 . If you want .php or .asp you need to pay an extra $100.

That’s $600 or $700 dollars for a small static website, and one in which the design will probably feature your novel’s dust-jacket heavily, which is something you’ve already paid for elsewhere.

If you want to market your book using a website, you’re going to need a number of things that aren’t included above:

The ability to add content. Sites that regularly add/update material are – for obvious reasons – more attractive to both search engines and visitors. Having three pages online might work o.k if you’re already world famous, but if you’re a struggling author you’ll need to use your website as a tool to gain an audience, and three static pages is not going to do you any favours. You’ll get as much attention that way as you would leaving a single copy of your novel on the upper deck of the bus home – i.e not much.

The ability to integrate with social networks: The above package doesn’t stop you from setting up social networking accounts, but it doesn’t include them or integrate them with your eventual site. Trying to market your book online without using facebook, twitter, myspace etc is like entering the ring with your hands-tied.

Search Engine Optimisation: The description of the services on offer focusses heavily on the visual, but there’s no mention of working with you to ensure that your site is optimised for search engines. The deal offers you a pretty web-site, that will most likely end up hidden under a bushel as no-one will find it. Search Engine Optimisation should be an equally important part of any web design

And that’s all just for starters.

The Bodu Writers standard package offers the following:

• Customised installation of wordpress
  We’ll set up the super-easy-to-use free software WordPress, but customise it to your needs to make it more of a content management system rather than the simple blogging tool it’s usually used for. You’ll be able to add pages and blog posts whenever you like, and as your website grows so will the possibility of reaching out to a new audience for your book.
• Graphic Design
  As a self-published author you’ve already got the main design element paid for – the book cover. We’ll design a site template that shows off your cover to its full advantage. We do a number of sample site designs, getting feedback from the client on each one in order to work out what their tastes are. Based on that feedback we do the final design.
• Search Engine Optimisation
  We know that a happy client is one who can see his/her website performing well in the search engines, and one which is getting visited. With that in mind, we’ll ensure that the design follows the best practice guidelines issued by the major search engines. We’ll also explain to you what you need to do to improve your site’s visibility – remember, the code and structure of any site is important in s.e.o but a huge part of it is also the content created by the website owner (you).
• Social Networking Sites
  We’ll set you up on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, with profiles customised to compliment your main site. We’ll also give you our own tips and guidelines on how to use these social networks to good effect. [We can also set you up on other social networks of your choosing, though this is subject to additional cost to be negotiated.]
• Tech Support for a year
  We design your site for you to be able to manage it on your own, but we won’t leave you stranded. We realise it can take a bit of time, particularly if you’re not technically minded, to get up and running and feel comfortable with your site. We offer free tech support for one year as part of the package.

And the cost? Our websites for authors costs just €200

That’s a whole lot more for a whole lot less!

What about hosting/domain name etc?
These aren’t included in the price, for the simple reason that they are annual recurring costs. We can advise you on where to go, how to register a domain, or set up a hosting account – but the annual cost remains for you to pay. It’s worth pointing out that the self-publishing example provided above has the same conditions regarding hosting and domain registration – so the difference in price between our package and theirs remains the same.

How long does it take to get set up?
Typically we can get you up and running within a week – that includes time to do different draft designs, to consult with you to choose the design which suits you best, and to ensure the site is set up correctly. We’ll then help you over a week or two to get used to the site structure and ensure that you’re comfortable updating it.

Interested? Get in touch with us for a no-obligation discussion about how we can meet your website needs as an author

Back in April Google guru Matt Cutts decided to move his blog from his www.mattcutts.com domain to another that he owns, www.dullest.com, changing host and ip address at the same time. All things that can have an impact on how your website performs both for visitors and for search engines.

Now he’s moved it back, and plans to blog a little bit about the experience. It will, no doubt, be recommended reading, because it’s a very common experience – particularly for people starting out with a website.

Commonly it happens like this. You do up a website, or get it done for you by a friend. It’s no great shakes, but it works and you start getting visitors. You develop a following over a period – say a year – and decide it’s time to expand. You do some research and realise that your url structure is an s.e.o. setback, possible security risk, and a pain in the ass for your visitors. So you pay a professional web-design company to update your site, adding design features and switching to search engine friendly links. Maybe at the same time you decide that you want to change the domain name of the site as well.

It takes time and patience, but eventually your brand spanking new site is launched, and you’re delighted. After a while, though, you notice that you’ve lost some page rank, and that your visitor numbers are down.

What may well have happened is that your design company haven’t followed the best practice of redirecting all your old url’s to the new with an .htaccess 301 permanent redirect command. An easy way to check this is to go browse to one of your old url’s – if the redirect has been done correctly your new url should appear in the browser address window.

If you’re not redirecting your old urls to the new, search engines will probably see two near identical versions of the page at two different urls – at which point they’ll judge one of the pages to be duplicate content.

Just as important, if someone browses through an old link to your site, instead of being taken to your snazzy new site, they’ll end up back at the old site (if they’re lucky. We’ve heard more than one story of old files being deleted from the server once a new structure has been launched – meaning visitors get a .404 error).

It’ll be interesting to read Cutts’ experience, also of moving hosts and ip addresses. There’s still a lot of debate about how much your hosting location and ip address affect search results. Having a specific tld (top level domain – .com, .co.uk, .it, .ie etc) or hosting location does seem to affect the performance of a site in a particular country specific searches – something that has caused a lot of controversy for example in Australia, where hosting costs have in the past been prohibitively expensive. Many webmasters have complained that availing of cheaper hosting in the states seems to adversely affect their rankings in the google australia index.

The bottom line if you’re a non-technical person with a website, paying someone to update its design, move host, or change anything fundamental regarding the site’s architecture, is to be aware that serious problems can easily occur just at the moment you’re trying to make the site so much better. In a perfect world the web designer will already be on top of things, but in the real world the onus is on you to ask questions and make sure that best practices are being followed.

Google are rolling out various search options that, in theory, will change the way you search for things. It’s unclear how widely available they are at the moment, but plenty of people are seeing a small ’show options’ link at the top of their search results, which opens up  a new page of tools to refine and redirect your search. Think of them as an indication of where Google imagines search going.

One of the flashiest ones (in more ways than one – as it’s powered by flash) is the wonderwheel. Click on it and you’ll get something like the following – where the search term is google wonder wheel

Click on the tangential circle ‘document cookie’ and you get this, with a different set of results

This is a handy function broadly fitting into that noble category of ’second guessing’ your search request. In many cases when you search for something, you’re not 100% sure that you’ve used the correct search term to produce what you’re looking for. This function gives you some visual clues to hopefully get you arriving on target.

What does it mean for search engine optimisation? Well, it’s a very clear indication that Google , when faced with competition whether it be from social networks like twitter, or from computational answer machines like the much-touted (bologna failing) Wolfram Alpha, is refusing to stand still. It means that the search engine giant is actively working to change how people search – and if it changes how people search, then there are various sites that will no-doubt find themselves in difficulty (just as other sites will see themselves getting an unexpected boost).

How to prepare yourself for these changes? Well it’s back to basics, and the most common sense approach. Make sure your site is designed following the clear guidelines that google and others have published. Make sure your site offers original and useful content – and make sure that that content is visible to all your visitors (search engine bots included). Get online and converse – let people know your site is there (and they in turn, if it’s of value, will let others know – including search engines).

In short, make your website the best it can be for your potential visitors, rather than solely focussing on google pagerank and s.e.r.p’s etc.

With specific regard to Google’s Wonder Wheel
Try using it on your own list of keywords for your site. See what related searches come out, and consider whether your site fits into those categories – and if so, are you presenting your content effectively enough to attract visitors for new keyword phrases.

There’s a great conversation up on Fora.tv between Tim O’Reilly – the publishing guru who was at the forefront of coining and defining the term Web 2.0 – which we recommend to anyone who’s thinking about setting up a website.  For those of you who are up to date with online trends and developments it may be retracing some old-ground, but in a useful ‘revision’ mode. For those of you who know nothing about what Web 2.0 may or may not be (and don’t be embarassed – you’re in the majority, outside of the web-developing community), this is a useful place to start.

The key distinction between web 1.0 and web 2.0 is simply a way of thinking – and it’s not necessarily an intuitive way of thinking, at least from a business sense. It is, according to O’Reilly, ‘not a new version – it was figuring out what worked about the web, and what didn’t‘. So, when you’re thinking about what type of site you want, it’s worth thinking with a different cap on, rather than the simple ‘I want to sell stuff on my site’ approach. Sure, that may be your ultimate goal (and Amazon, for example, is O’Reilly’s main example of a succesful Web 2.0 company), but your first thought should be ‘will that work well online?’.

And one of the best ways to do this is to look at your own online activity – using facebook, sending emails, how you search for information etc. Spend a week trying to be conscious of how you do things online, and with whom. Start taking notes of the things that you find useful/interesting online, and how that could fit in with your site.