Posts by Adam Wood

Using compression on websites seems to be the way to go if you have a bandwidth limit, as it will reduce page load times, increase user experience and will have a greater likelihood of getting higher conversions. However there are certain downfalls to this technology. One of the main downfalls is that although compression is great at compressing static pages such as html, using the same method on sever side scripting technologies such as PHP and ASP causes high loading on the server CPU as the compression will need to be implemented for every request. So, in light of this, it’s best to enable compression if most of the pages are static, as this will give the best trade off between page load time and server resource allocation.

In conclusion, there are a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration that can affect whether compression is a viable option. Since the average compression time is around 500 milliseconds and each file type compresses at different rates, you will need to make up your own mind whether the compression trade off will be beneficial to your site.

Adam Wood
Seo Programmer

If used correctly then the answer is ‘no’, you should have no trouble using server side scripting languages such as ASP, PHP or Perl and still be able to have an effective SEO campaign.

Most dynamic websites use either a MYSql or Access database to store content and then dynamically pull content based on query string ids or sessions, which, in some cases, can cause duplication and SEO unfriendly URL structures. However with the search engine algorithms getting more complex, other factors are taken into consideration such as page load times, while size can also be a contributing factor.

For the most part, server side scripting languages are pretty clean in producing the resulting HTML; however I have come across many sites that loop through database tables and produce code cloning, which can cause issues with page load times. Sites with messy unnecessary code will have high code to content ratios and can potentially cause issues with search engines indexing your site and causing a loss in rankings.

Most of these issues are not so major that will cause your site to drop off the face of the earth, but it’s certainly something to be aware of and fixed if possible.

Adam Wood
ASP / SEO Programmer