Moving Web Hosts – What you need to know!

Recently I was helping a client move from one host to another. After going through this experience a couple of times with various clients, I thought I would write down my experiences so one might know the steps to move a site from one hosting company to another. You will need to get copies of your existing files. This is best done my getting them from your existing host. This may be done via FTP. In some cases you can download the files from the site, but more modern sites will run Content … [Read more...]

Google Using Page Speed as a Ranking Factor in Search Results

Google announced this week that the speed of a page is now being considered as part of how they rank pages on a web site.  This has some people happy, others scrambling. There are a couple of things which need to be considered with this news. Google uses over 200 factors to "grade" a site, determining where it should be placed in the search engine rankings. Adding 1 additional factor, unless it is a large factor should have little effect on the search results. "All things being equal I … [Read more...]

Happy Birthday Firefox!

Firefox turns five today. For some, they remember what the Web was like in 2004 - Internet Explorer 6 was the dominant browser, and had not been updates in 3 years, web technology was stagnating because of it. Now, browsers are faster, and doing more - new standards are coming out (HTML5, CSS3, AJAX libraries, and more) - and while the techno-babble means little to many, it also means everything.  It means websites that can do more, and do it faster. It has also heralded other browsers … [Read more...]

Does clean HTML lead to better Search Engine Rankings?

I've seen numerous posts where people have claimed that good clean HTML leads to better SEO rankings. I've even talked about the lie that of the link between SEO and valid HTML. I've yet to see any studies done which verify this claim and in fact I've even seen evidence to the opposite effect being true. I pointed out how in some competitive markets, the higher the ranking for the site the worse the validation recently in another post. This does not mean that poor code relates to higher … [Read more...]