Viewing Your Web Site as an Employee

The server that your website is hosted on, the way that it responds to request, like an employee in a store, can indirectly impact the ability to generate conversions. If you have employees, I am sure you regularly look into how people are performing in front of customers, but do you do the same for your web site?

Continuing down this analogy, search engine crawlers are like secret shoppers, they take notes about the experience in the store, their experience with employees and the shopping experience (i.e. what they could find within the store). The only difference is that this report is not given to the owner (some insights can be ascertained in various webmaster portals) and this is just one of the things that search engines use in their "independent" findings that are brought in to determine the ranking of web sites for a particular search term.

OK, whether you understand all of the analogy above, the short of it is that your web server's performance is really important to your organic performance, but it is typically overlooked.

Here are a few things to consider when looking at the server level:

There are a couple of things that should be considered regarding sub-domains. The first thing is that sub-domains are typically each is considered as a unique domain. This translates into each of them competing with one another for rankings, so if each sub-domain isn't distinct enough, you risk the chance that none of them will show up in search results because you don't have a consolidated approach.

Another thing to note, non-www, sub-domains set up for development, secure versions and other sub-domains can sometimes cause duplicate content in a search engine's index. A canonical header tag isn't the best answer, rather ensuring that every page of your web site has only ULR for each page and that every other version of the page (non-www, https version, etc.) is permanently redirected to the page that you want to be the primary page in search results. This leads to the second area that is usually overlooked, server response codes.

Server response codes are signals for a web server to notify another computer the status of the file it is requesting, it is just that simple. There are a number of server response codes that are important to ensure your server is sending the right signal to the computer requesting information, here are the important response codes:

• 200 - OK
• 301 - File Moved Permanently
• 302 - File Moved Temporarily
• 404 - Cannot Find Requested File

The OK response is expected for all files that the server knows what to deliver for a particular request, so when a file (web page) loads, it responds with this code. When a file is not found it delivers either that it cannot find the file (404) or send the computer where the new page is (301 or 302). If it is not found because it is temporarily unavailable, it should provide a 302 response and send them to a page that should suffice and if the file has been moved permanently, it should provide a 301 response and send the requesting computer the new file. Just like a physical change of address card you might file at your local post office (in the US) when you are moving, search engines take this information literally.

So, if you tell them that it has moved temporarily (302 response), then they don't send users to the new page, rather, they continue to come back to the original page and wait for it to come back. In a circumstance that the response code is permanently moved (301 response), they will update their index sending users to the new page from search results and also send (some) of the earned value from the original page to the new one.

If a 404 response is delivered, similar to a "Return To Sender" for mail, they will update their index and not send users to the page in the future.

Server response codes can be monitored. There are a number of tools that you can tell you the server response codes for your pages (Httpfox, Live HTTP Headers, Xenu) and you can monitor errors by tagging your error page and identify requested file and where they are being directed from.

Daisy chains are also important to identify and limit. A daisy chain is when a redirect is followed by another (and so on). Too many steps, (one is ideal) can lower the efficiency of your web server and also indirectly impact your SEO performance, leading us to yet another web server concern, efficiency.

One more thing that can be very important to differentiate your web site from your competition is the speed of your server's response. Unlike the items discussed above, this is a minor way to differentiate your site when it comes to SEO (more so for Paid Search as it impacts Google's Quality Score in AdWords). But it can make a lot of business sense as well. The speed of your server can be directly impacted by the complexity of your code, both amount and how much it presented on a page by page basis. It can also impact the amount of information your web server is processing and serving up, potentially impacting the amount of bandwidth your web site needs and driving up your costs for hosting.

Why is it important? A search engine spider must process code (such as CSS and JavaScript) when it is presented in the code. By externalizing the styling and scripts, whenever possible, the spiders can get to what they came for, your content.

Improving your web server's performance can help you set your web site apart from your competitors. Like almost everything that relates to search performance and SEO, the devil is in the details and almost everything can have an impact on other elements. Benchmarking will be important, improving your site's performance should be considered as a regular maintenance initiative. This should help your holistic approach to SEO.