One of the items we recommend to many of our search engine marketing clients is to use Web compression, namely Gzip. Gzip allows the browser to download a compressed version of the Website, much like the way you zip an attachment in an email.

Gzip offers some interesting benefits. The most obvious benefit is speed. Internal tests here at USWeb have showed a decrease by up to 40% in page load time. And as many of you know, the speed of your site can have a direct impact on your conversion. If you think about that, this means that your site may convert better because it’s faster, which means that you convert better on pay-per-click campaigns, which allows your CPA to be higher, which in turn lets you be more competitive in your bidding against competitors.

Another benefit of Gzip is potentially a better relationship with search engine crawlers. Google for example can read a Gzip file much more quickly than crawling a site manually. As I mentioned in my posting about shared hosting vs. dedicated hosting, Google tries very hard to be a good Web citizen. If your site is slow, the spider may think it’s taxing your resources and visit your site less often. This is not what you want. You want the ability to make a change on your site, and then see that change reflected in the search engines quickly. Gzip is a nice way of handing the Google spider your pages with great speed.

Gzip is not difficult to install, especially on a Linux machine. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us here at USWeb.

You can download gzip here

gzip, online marketing, search engine optimization

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.