Google Site Performance - Site Page Speed Tool

New Toy! Yea. Google now has as part of their webmaster tools a site performance page loading speed estimator that looks at a random selection of pages on your site and averages the load speed. This provides you a quick and dirty look at any load delays or issues you may on your site. Thanks again Google for a quick and simple tool that is free and highly useful. Yet I must point out that even though I use Google webmasters tools often, this feature was pointed out to me by my friend Leroy and his site http://www.interfacebus.com/ .

The site performance page speed tool, according to Google's webmaster tools, Free Class Notes Online averages 2.8 seconds to load as of the last update on January 26 of this year. This is faster then 53 percent of sites out there. The index or home page averages a load time of 1.7 seconds.

While on my other site, Resume Advantage Pro, the average load time is 2.6 seconds across the entire web site, 56 percent better then other sites, with the home page or index page loading in 2.1 seconds. This is fantastic because this index page is full of resume writing and free career advice articles and tips that are continually updated. I believe part of the good performance numbers comes from using Wordpress as my CMS which is optimized well.

Free Class Notes Online - 2010 Stats

This past year, Free Class Notes Online performed well pulling in 42,853 total visitors from 170 countries, and a total of 104,901 page views for the year. I did switch completely the URL address from ClassNotes123.com over to FreeClassNotesOnline.com in early 2010 which is why my Google Analytics data is missing the first quarter.

I do have the numbers from the previous URL of Class Notes 123. There were 4,323 visitors, January through March of 2010 from the old class notes site. I made the switch because is appeared that the URL was hindering my traffic. I can honestly say I did see an up tick in traffic after the switch but I believe that's from having more keyword combinations in the URL name.

The bulk of my traffic is organic with Google search engine dominating the traffic source at over 77 percent of the total traffic. Yahoo and Bing organic traffic is very low totaling less then 4 percent combined. One could say if I optimize a bit for Yahoo and / or Bing I might see a jump in traffic; something I'll consider throughout this year as I find time. Overall it was a good year for traffic. Now if I can only get the same traffic on my newest site, http://www.resumeadvantagepro.com/ , then I'll be really, really happy! Cheers all. -Brian

How Often Should You Update a Sitemap

Onsite maintenance completed this morning with additional testing performed on the main index site, http://www.resumeadvantagepro.com/  We use Xenu Link checker to look for any onsite or external broken links or invalid URL issues. In running the report we do always find that there is an odd issue with a forbidden request 403 Error, specifically generated from the comment block. Not an issue but makes the report look a bit odd but nothing unusual for us. Per this reporting, no orphan files were reported or internal page errors. Currently we’re showing 417 total internal URL's by MIME type.

Additionally, we're updating the uploaded Google Webmaster sitemap. There is always the question of how many times or how often should you update a sitemap. In our case, we often generate a new .xml site map once or twice a month depending on the level of new content and blog activity we have. This round we submitted 108 pages to be indexed, up 13 sense our last sitemap update.

Important Announcement - Sub-domain Site Maintenance

RE: Resume Advantage Pro's video workshop member's area.
The sub-domain membership site for Resume Advantage Pro will undergo maintenance this Sunday, February 06 between 5am to 7am EST. This may effect streaming video speeds during this time period. However, it is anticipated little disruption will occur during the entire 2 hour block of time. Streaming video speeds may only be slower during random intervals.

No issues will be affected on the primary product pages, the free content blog, support help desk, or any issues with our shopping cart to include the affiliate marketing program area. All of these components are run on different DNS or attached services.

If there are any issues that occur outside this 2 hour window please let us know.

Google Crawl Stats for ResumeAdvantagePro.com

Following months of product development and revising our product distribution channels, moving primarily to online streaming video and PDF resume templates and Microsoft Word files; our focus for Resume Advantage Pro has shifted to marketing and free site content.

In the last 90 days the crawl stats for the Googlebot activity has shown steady growth, revisiting http://www.resumeadvantagepro.com/ more frequently with averages of 20 plus pages crawled daily. Not bad sense we did little to promote the site until early December 2010.