Clear leadership. The land grab in digital advertising right now is a frightening sight. Creative groups want to do media, media wants to build creative, social media “experts” want to drive online strategies, and the proliferation of display choices from traditional display buys to ad networks and exchanges is enough to give the hardiest of souls pause. As such, it is essential for clients to be transparent and clear on who is driving what and to set an expectation for everyone to play nice and work together. This is rarely easy, as everyone traditionally positions for his or her own cause, but the marketers who are willing to appoint a leader and command inclusive behavior will reap benefits faster. (more…)

Google have indicated that their search algorithms are due to change again as the search engine will factor in how quickly a web page loads to how well a site ranks in Google.

Page speed is going to become the buzzword for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in 2010, as websites scramble to make their sites quicker and cleaner to allow pages to rank better in Google.

The idea has been toyed with for a while at Google, and page speed is already a contributing factor to the algorithm that marks the quality score of AdWords, as slow loading online advertising can prove expensive if it means users ignore the advertising.

Implementing page speed into Google’s main algorithm is a mammoth task, but one Google seems intent on rolling out. In an interview with WebProNews at PubCon in Las Vegas, Google software engineer Matt Cutts said: “Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus.”

There are a host of tools available to make your website run smoother and identify problems that may be causing the page to load slowly. Mr Cutts pointed to a Firefox plugin called Page Speed, along with WebPageTest.org which can help deliver analysis of slow parts of a website.

Google has also launched Google Closure Tools earlier this month to optimise JavaScript on websites and condense code data to make sites cleaner and operate faster. “A lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘How do I have my site be fast?’ without having a bunch of custom JavaScript,” Mr Cutts concluded.

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