Search Quality Observation No. 1 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Google)

• By: sean
• Categories: Search Engine Optimization
• Comments: 0

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Good computer security strikes a balance between security and usability. For example, a fifty character password might be more secure than one with less characters, but it would also be an impediment to usability. Not having a password could be easy, but it would also be unsecure. Rather than either extreme, a compromise should be made between what is secure and what is practical.

In internet search there is a similar dynamic. It involves usability and usefulness. There is an impetus for usability but there is also a question, will this come at the expense of usefulness? This is an example of where it may:

What is a Twitter, Anyway?

• By: sean
• Categories: Social Media Marketing, Twitter
• Comments: 0

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If you’re a technical neophyte, new to social media or new to the internet as a whole, or a few generations behind in consumer electronics, like myself, then you may have recently found yourself asking some or all of the following questions:

• Who said that?
• What are those symbols?
• How does Twitter work, anyway?
• And finally, what’s a retweet anyhow?

I’ll attempt to answer some of these questions for you now but in order to find out, we’ll have to hit the streets. But not just any streets, the information superhighway.

PHP Session HTTP Header Optimization

• By: sean
• Categories: Web Design & Development
• Comments: 3

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Let’s make the Web faster. I perceived something that may be of interest in regards to PHP, sessions, and SEO. On at least one installation, the default HTTP headers sent by the function session_start( ) were set to disable cache. In some cases, I think these headers may not be “good for Googlebot.”

As you may know, Google made an algorithm update that takes into account many aspects of site performance, often called Page Speed. Optimizing HTTP headers is one of the checkpoints and enabling browser caching via HTTP headers is a sub-point. If Googlebot respects site performance enhancing HTTP headers then they’ll probably also acknowledge wacky ones like the PHP session_start( ) default HTTP headers that say, “do not store a copy of this page for cache; always check with the server to see if you have the most recent copy of a page immediately before and after you request a page because this content expired back in 1981 and today is April 13, 2010.”

The perceived solution for the installation was to start sessions only on pages that needed them- instead of everywhere. Now, revisiting the topic I’ve also learned that using the session_cache_limiter( ) function to control what headers are sent may also work.