With more than 80% share in the search market, you may be forgiven for thinking that Google would consider itself to be the best search engine, but strangly they don’t.

Ok so if they don’t think they should be number 1 for search engine it must be Bing, or even Yahoo surely?

Erm, no actually, according to Google, the best result for search engine is… Dogpile!, seriously Dogpile. Number 2 is Altavista, a name I haven’t even heard in years.

So according to Google, the best two search engines are Dogpile and Altavista!.  Google have explained that as the visitor is searching on Google at the time then they don’t actually need to see Google. But this doesn’t explain why Bing and Yahoo don’t appear number 1 and 2.

My guess is that whatever algorithm Google uses to stop Yahoo and Bing search results appearing in Google is at work hear, as Dogpile and Altavista don’t actually use their own search service but use Google’s, Bing’s and Yahoo’s then they are safe to appear in the result.

As far as the search engines are concerned there should only ever be one form of redirect, and that is via the “301″ method. Any other form of redirect is considered bad form and will most likely cause all sorts of issues in search results.

The way you actually carry out a 301 redirect depends on the server you have (either windows or Linux) and the type of redirect you need.

Redirecting with the .htaccess file

If you are running Linux on your server you should use the .htaccess method. To create a canonical redirect (ie http://example.com to http://www.example.com or vice versa) you need to add the following to your existing .htaccess file, or if one doesn’t exist create one and add the code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

If you want to redirect one domain to another you can use the following code:

redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/

To redirect pages the method used depends if you are redirecting static pages or dynamic ones, the code for either are shown below.

To redirect a static page:

redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.example.com/newpage.htm

To redirect a dynamic page you need to put in the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=**$
RewriteRule ^/page.php$ http://www.example.com/newname.htm? [L,R=301]

The id=** is the query string and the page.php the name of the file immediately prior to the query.

301 Redirects using IIS

If you are on a windows server you will need to use IIS (internet information services) to perform 301 redirects, and it is just done the same way regardless of which version of Windows server you use. To carry out a 301 you need to do the following:

In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
 Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL".
 Enter the redirection page
 Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"
 Click on "Apply"

And it’s as simple as that, job done.

There are quite a number of changes you can make in order for a website to run at it’s fastest and I will try and cover the easiest and most effective here. Before we get started, the most effective tools I have found to measure and improve the performance of a website are 2 plugins for Firebug, which is itself a plugin for Firefox. The plugins are Page Speed, created by Google and YSlow, created by Yahoo. Both are open source and provide excellent information. Watch out for Firebug though as it can slow down Firefox, my advice is only run it when you actually need it and have it disabled the rest of the time.

1. Choose the right hosting

This can often get overlooked in the quest to find the lowest cost hosting service, but it can have a dramatic difference to the website speed, what configuration options you have and how much control you actually get.  Shared hosting is great for a budget option, and is usually fine for small to medium websites but you are limited by the way the server is set up as to what you can achieve, for example if Gzip compression (explained later) is not available there is no way to add this function. The other issue with shared hosting is the volume of other sites you are sharing with, which can  be upwards of a few hundred or even a thousand in extreme cases.

By far the better option, especially for a larger website is dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting means you have a whole server all to yourself, and your own IP address(es). The speed difference can be incredible and you can control the server completely, making any configuration changes needed and even installing software. Dedicated servers can be a bit on the expensive side though, which is where virtual dedicated servers come in.

Virtual Dedicated hosting offers the best of both worlds, affordable prices along with much faster speeds over shared hosting, and the ability to still have full control over the (virtual) server.

2. Code Smart, Code Clean

The next step is to make sure your code is clean without any errors and ideally has been simplified or reduced in size as much as possible. Don’t use inline CSS and keep all CSS and JavaScript off the page. CSS files should be combined into one where ever possible and referenced from the header. JavaScript should ideally be referenced from the bottom of the page, although this will not work for all JavaScript. For the JavaScript that can’t be placed at the bottom, make sure it is placed below the CSS, always load CSS first.

White space should be kept to an absolute minimum in the pages, the CSS files, and the JavaScript as this will reduce the file sizes.

When actually writing the HTML, try not to use unnecessary containers and keep the code to a minimum, Div’s are much more preferable than using the bulkier TABLES.

CSS should also be used smartly, use ID’s rather than classes wherever possible and try not to nest elements, use “Menu a” rather than “menu ul li a”.  Try to keep the CSS on one line wherever possible, so rather than:

body {
	margin:0 auto;
	padding:0px 0px 0px 0px;
	background-color:#253340 ;
	font-family:Century gothic, Arial,Tahoma,sans-serif;
	color:#161514;
	font-size:13px;
	}

Use this:

body {margin:0 auto;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px;background-color:#253340;

font-family:Century gothic, Arial,Tahoma,sans-serif;color:#161514;font-size:13px;}

It may not look as pretty and is a little more difficult to read (although you do get used to it) but it really can reduce the size of the CSS file dramatically.

When creating or using JavaScript, try to avoid inline elements such as “on mouseover”, instead call the JavaScript using an ID.

Any JavaScript or CSS files should also be “minified” after you have finished with them, their are many free utilities that can do this for you and the space saved can be substantial.

3.Optimise Images

Making sure your images are compressed to the best levels can make a big difference in page load speed, Google’s PageSpeed tool will actually compress any images on a page for you, and show you how much of a saving in Kb this will make. When using background images, try using CSS sprites and combine all these images in one as this reduces the number of HTTP requests and improves the speed, you can see how to do this here:  How to use CSS Sprites

You should also avoid scaling images in the HTML as this does cause a speed reduction and always make sure that the images height and width are clearly mentioned, along with a descriptive ALT tag.

4.Add Expires Headers

Expires headers make the components of a website cachable by the web browser, this is used primarily for images but this can also be used for scripts, stylesheets and flash components. By using this effectively whenever a visitor either navigates to another page of the site, or returns within the expire period, the website will load substantially faster.

The most effective method I have found in applying this (on a Linux server) is by using the .htaccess file, there a few ways you can do this, depending on what your server supports, at least one of the following should work:

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A604800

ExpiresByType text/css A604800

ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash A2592000
ExpiresByType text/html A600

If that one doesn’t work, try this one:

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault A29030400
Header append Cache-Control "private"

5.Gzip Components

Gzip is a form of compression that drastically reduces the size of a file, and offers a better compression level than a standard .zip file. Most modern hosts offer support for gzip (although some some shared hosts do not) but if you use a cms there may be obstacles to overcome. Wordpress in particular removed support for gzip from version 2.5 upwards but there are a few plugins available to re-instate the support.

The most effective method I have found it a comination of gzipping the CSS and Javascript files and then using our friend .htaccess again to do the hard work. Most modern file compressors will output to the gzip standard, my personal favorite is 7zip, not just because it’s free but it also happens to be just about the best. When saving the files make sure you use the extension “.jgz” rather than the standard “.gz” as this will make our apple friends happy.

php_flag zlib.output_compression On
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 5

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.jgz -f
RewriteRule (.*)\.js$ $1\.js.jgz [L]
AddType "text/javascript" .js.jgz
AddEncoding gzip .jgz

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.jgz -f
RewriteRule (.*)\.css$ $1\.css.jgz [L]
AddType "text/css" .css.jgz
AddEncoding gzip .jgz

6. Parallelize downloads across hostnames

According to the HTTP 1.1 specification browsers should have only 2 concurrent connections at any one time per hostname and although this is not strictly adhered to, they each do only allow so many. This means that if the HTML page contains references to more resources (CSS, JavaScript, images…) than the maximum per hostname allowed then then those above that threshold are qued until the remaining download.

In other words if the browser can only accept 4 connections from one host at a time, and there are 20 resources on the page then these resources will be downloaded sequentially, 4 at a time.

The way to get around this is to serve the resources from mutliple hostnames, this would mean that the browser will parallize these additional downloads, leading to a faster page load.

For a more detailed overview of this method you can see Google’s explanation, Parallelize Downloads across hostnames.

7. Optional HTML Tags

If you are writing in HTML rather than XHTML you can make your code leaner and meaner by omitting optional HTML tags. As defined in HTML 4DTD, there are many tags that are either no longer required, or do no longer need to be closed. The <head></head> and <body></body> are two examples, how about lists, you no longer need </li>.

Google has a wealth of information about this here, there is also a video to go along with it:  Optional HTML Tags.

8. Keep Experimenting

There are many other ways you can improve the speed of your webpages including optimising the way the actual code (PHP, ASP.NET etc) works, tweaking the caching and minimising browser reflow, my advice is get the basics in place and then experiment, it really does pay off.

“Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June?”

You can see his video over at the Google Webmaster central video channel, but it may be difficult to spot as it actually answers a completely different question:

“Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs?”

This has caused a backlash by many in the SEO industry, so much so that Matt Cutts actually posted an article on his blog “More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results” , unfortunately it still doesn’t answer the question, or explain why Google UK results are so poor. It’s not confined just to UK search either though, other countries are seeing this invasion of poor irrelevant results.

In Matt’s post he invited visitors to comment of specific examples, and so far has seen about 140 comments placed, what is clear is that these poor search results are not just confined to small niches but mainstream results. How about some examples:

How about “family home kent“, there are only 2 UK results!, the first being the map, the other being at position 8!, all the others are from the US.

You can see it’s not just US results that are causing issues with this one “dining out“, the second result is from south africa, the 4th, 6th and 8th results are US (a bit far to go for a meal) while the 9th result is from Israel!

“university admission” shows Stamford in position 3 (US), university of california in position 5, princeton at 6 and finland at 7 with the last place on the first page being a US news story. How far do you expect our students to go for an education Google!

I could go on but this is really starting to wind me up. Google sit up, pay attention and get the algorithm sorted please. Our British businesses are facing a hard enough time in this recession without having to compete with these irrelevant results!

Up to May the results returned for this search term were around 14.2 million and then late may they shot up to around 28 million results, many of these on the first few pages of either very low quality, old or from a different country including the USA and India.

Since this time there has been a marked “yoyo” affect for the results of this term, both in the volume returned and the quality of these results. In June the results jumped again to around 36 million and has stayed at this number until the end of July, where the volume currently stands at 38.8 million.

Interestingly if you leave “search suggest” on when typing in this phrase you will see the amount still recorded at 14.2 million results.

Back on the 14th July (2 weeks ago) Google employee Matt Cutts advised he was going to record another of his regular Q&A videos and invited questions from the community. The most popular question has been:

“Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June?”

There have yet to be any new videos posted on the Google webmaster central video channel, we can but wait to see if Matt will answer this important question.