As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images.
Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.
Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. They can significantly slow down a user’s web experience, especially on bandwidth-constrained networks such as a mobile network. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Our team focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today.
To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, we used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010. We applied the techniques from VP8 video intra frame coding to push the envelope in still image coding. We also adapted a very lightweight container based on RIFF. While this container format contributes a minimal overhead of only 20 bytes per image, it is extensible to allow authors to save meta-data they would like to store.
While the benefits of a VP8 based image format were clear in theory, we needed to test them in the real world. In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size. We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image.
To help you assess WebP’s performance with other formats, we have shared a selection of open-source and classic images along with file sizes so you can visually compare them on this site. We are also releasing a conversion tool that you can use to convert images to the WebP format. We’re looking forward to working with the browser and web developer community on the WebP spec and on adding native support for WebP. While WebP images can’t be viewed until browsers support the format, we are developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome. We plan to add support for a transparency layer, also known as alpha channel in a future update.
We’re excited to hear feedback from the developer community on our discussion group, so download the conversion tool, try it out on your favorite set of images, and let us know what you think.
By Richard Rabbat, WebP Team
Source -
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/09/webp-new-image-format-for-web.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FDcni+%28Google+Code+Blog%29
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
8 Link Building Strategies You Need To Know
Link building can be time consuming, frustrating and often confusing. However, link building is a huge part of SEO and necessary for your site to reach top ranks in the search engine results pages. Aren't familiar with link building? No problem. Read on to learn why link building is important and how you can build links to your site, improve your link popularity and raise your search engine page rank.
Why is increasing links important? When other sites link to your site it directs visitors to it and also shows Google and other search engines that you are a legitimate site that's worthy of some attention. However, the sites that link to you must be relevant to your site. The other site's topic must be related to yours otherwise Google will see it as dishonest, black hat SEO or spam.
When you have a significant number of relevant links that lead back to your site, you build your online reputation which in turn, will improve your page rank on the search results pages. Increasing your page rank will allow potential customers to see you, rather than your competition, when they search for certain keywords that are relevant to your business. This will help grow your business and boost your profit. However, the question remains, how do you get relevant sites to link to you? Here are a few things you can do to urge others to link to you.
Create and Maintain a Blog
A blog is a way to write about industry news, engage readers about your business and speak to your customers and potential customers in a conversational tone. When you write a blog, link keywords back to your business's Web site. The more blog posts you write, the more relevant links are going back to your site. Also when you post great content on your blog, others will come across it and want to link back to what you wrote. Link to other relevant blogs and comment on them to urge those blog owners to view your blog. This increases the chance that they will link back to you.
Submit Your Site to Link Directories
A big part of link building in the SEO world is submitting to link directories. Many link directories are free to submit to and as long as you submit to a relevant category the link directory will accept your request and link to your site. You can also use Craigslist to place a classified ad. Another link building tool is a topical Squidoo page, where you can link to expert documents and other useful tools in your field and also create a link back to your site. You can also submit a story to social bookmarking sites like Digg or Delicious that links to an article on your site. Another easy link you can get is from a forum. Many forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make good contributions to a forum, some people might follow your links, read your site, link to your site or buy products from your site.
Create Lists on Your Site
People love lists and they're easy to link to. If you build a list like "10 easy tips to help you __," people will read and link to it. Just make sure the list is relevant to your industry or business. Create a resource list on your site. If it's good people may link to your resource list, or your resources might put you on their resource list.
Source - http://www.seo-news.com/
Why is increasing links important? When other sites link to your site it directs visitors to it and also shows Google and other search engines that you are a legitimate site that's worthy of some attention. However, the sites that link to you must be relevant to your site. The other site's topic must be related to yours otherwise Google will see it as dishonest, black hat SEO or spam.
When you have a significant number of relevant links that lead back to your site, you build your online reputation which in turn, will improve your page rank on the search results pages. Increasing your page rank will allow potential customers to see you, rather than your competition, when they search for certain keywords that are relevant to your business. This will help grow your business and boost your profit. However, the question remains, how do you get relevant sites to link to you? Here are a few things you can do to urge others to link to you.
Create and Maintain a Blog
A blog is a way to write about industry news, engage readers about your business and speak to your customers and potential customers in a conversational tone. When you write a blog, link keywords back to your business's Web site. The more blog posts you write, the more relevant links are going back to your site. Also when you post great content on your blog, others will come across it and want to link back to what you wrote. Link to other relevant blogs and comment on them to urge those blog owners to view your blog. This increases the chance that they will link back to you.
Submit Your Site to Link Directories
A big part of link building in the SEO world is submitting to link directories. Many link directories are free to submit to and as long as you submit to a relevant category the link directory will accept your request and link to your site. You can also use Craigslist to place a classified ad. Another link building tool is a topical Squidoo page, where you can link to expert documents and other useful tools in your field and also create a link back to your site. You can also submit a story to social bookmarking sites like Digg or Delicious that links to an article on your site. Another easy link you can get is from a forum. Many forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make good contributions to a forum, some people might follow your links, read your site, link to your site or buy products from your site.
Create Lists on Your Site
People love lists and they're easy to link to. If you build a list like "10 easy tips to help you __," people will read and link to it. Just make sure the list is relevant to your industry or business. Create a resource list on your site. If it's good people may link to your resource list, or your resources might put you on their resource list.
Source - http://www.seo-news.com/
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