Magic Site Optimization

Hello All...

Been working on website optimization all day. Really hard stuff when you are technically challenged to begin with...

One site I ran across that was helpful was http://www.1-hit-com . They have a handy little tool called a ' load time analyzer ' that clocks the load time of your website and makes suggestions to cut your load time down. This, and many others, are free for all to use...

If your website can't load in a reasonable length of time, you will lose a percentage of your visitors because of their impatience. Of course, if I were on a slow dial-up I would probably be a little less patient ...

My main site, StreetMagic.info , loads in eleven point three seconds. That is just above the recommended ten second maximum... but I'll have to live with it...

Their other free tools include:
Bookmark maker scripts, cloaking check, WHOIS tool, Google activity detector, html cleaner, keyword analyzer, meta tag generator, page ranking checker, robot.txt generator, search engine simulator, spelling checker, and a site that lets you see what your page looks like on different screen sizes. Among other scripts...

I build my sites with Site Spinner , a web authoring tool similar to Frontpage... but easier to use, in my opinion. This is the beginning of building your website. You can install Site Spinner on your computer, and even if you are, as I mentioned above, technologically challenged, you can STILL develop sites with a fair degree of sophistication without really 'knowing' what you are doing !

I can use the systems built-in FTP to make changes to my website, which I do daily, and almost-instantly publish my new or re-worked page (s) to my website. I had a web host at one time that had a built-in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get ) editor. I worked hard to get my little site listed well near the top in chosen search engines. I had the number one ranking in Google for David Blaine Secrets and David Blaine Secrets Revealed.. among other keywords.

And.. after months of inching my way to the top, I was working on my site one night about Two AM ( I normally work on my sites late at night ), and, because I had my site open and had the directory open using the wysiwyg editor.. my site was down.

Guess who came by.... a little Google spider. And, when he found my site down, my ranking IMMEDIATELY dropped out of the top one hundred for ALL my keywords.. It took me another couple of months to get my ranking back, and in the process, I learned NOT to mess with sites that allow online authoring...

Everything I do on Site Spinner is off-line... and then I upload in a half-minute or so. I will talk a little more about Site Spinner, and particularly my web host, next time....

Later folks..