How to Enhance Website Speed

Continued…

3) Compression Techniques: Compressing CSS, JavaScript and PHP

Compressing PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS content leads to a reduction in page size, which results in the pages being served faster to the browser.

• Compress all text and html:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

• Or, compress certain file types by extension:

<Files *.html>

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

</Files>

• Also, you can add following code in your htaccess file and enable compression using mod_gzip.

<IfModule mod_gzip.c>

mod_gzip_on Yes

mod_gzip_dechunk Yes

mod_gzip_item_include file (html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$

mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$

mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*

mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*

mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*

mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*

</IfModule>

4) Other Practices for enhancing website speed:

• Put StyleSheets at the top

• Put Scripts at the bottom

• Make JavaScript and CSS external

• Minify JavaScript and CSS

• Optimize images

• Do not scale images in HTML

Hope all these points will help you to enhance your website speed. Do comment!

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

Measuring Social Media Success

Social Media marketing has a major challenge which people see is how to measure it? My question to them is – Do they really have campaigns or strategies?
You will not find tangible items every time in social media marketing. But what you can do is – Define processes that can be measured. Social Media is not static and so as your plans and processes.

1. First Strike: Once you have started a campaign you must be getting some responses and replies. At this point of time the quality of response doesn’t matter. You are just ensuring your profile or blog is working.

2. Getting Replies: Once your profile or blog is ready and audience is listening it, now is the time to create an influence. Here feedback is very important. If people are visiting your blog or profile and not commenting then your content isn’t very social and you would be ending up loosing your viral references.

3. Useful replies: If you are getting replies favoring your content – negative or positive- matters most. Getting replies like “thanks for sharing “and “good work” confirms that you are doing things right. But getting comments, which add to the discussion and gives, a direction to the discussion thread is a better confirmation of your good work.

4. Increasing followers and readers: Targeting right followers is important rather than adding random people in your blog or profile. If targeted audience is chasing your blog or profile then it shows the value of your content.

5. Increasing scope: Is the scope of your conversation increasing or its just stick towards one subject? Catering audience of different subjects and directing them towards a same product or service is the key to a successful social media campaign. If you are selling a hybrid car then you must target, pollution, global warming, saving earth etc as a subject and direct them towards your top goal.

6. Referring: In any social network, there are people to talk to about a given subject. They are known as experts in that network. You should be able to count the number of people that name you as a resource that number should be increasing every week.

7. Quality of Network: The audience connecting to your network should be dynamic in nature and must be enthusiastic about the subject. They should have a healthy network of their own and must be actively participating. They should be able to communicate and must be related to your market direct or indirectly. This type of audience has two benefits – They can grow and they are measurable.

However the points mentioned are incomplete as social media is very dynamic. As it changes you have to derive your own metrics matching to your goals.

Posted in SMM | No Comments »

RedAlkemi gets ISO certificate extension

RedAlkemi received an extension of ISO 9001:2008 certification for Internet Online Marketing Services for the next three years.

RedAlkemi underwent a comprehensive external audit by a third party, The Moody International. The Moody International Group is a worldwide technical services organization that provides management system certification along with various other services on a local basis.

Two representatives from their organization conducted the whole audit. The audit was completed in two days and covered all the divisions across the board.

Alignment of our processes and systems to ISO norms, well maintained processes and customer-focused approach were instrumental in the extension of the ISO certification for RedAlkemi.

Through RedAlkemi’s Quality Policy, we have always committed ourselves to delivering high quality solutions to our customers, which fulfill their business needs, while nurturing a long-term partnership and enhancing their customer experience.

We aspire to achieve these objectives by inculcating an environment within our company & our people, towards customer focus, quality awareness and by fostering learning, knowledge-sharing, mentoring, improving our processes, adapting new technologies and building trust through transparency and mutual respect.

We further commit ourselves to be a socially responsible company and fulfill our obligations towards the expectations of our external stakeholders.

Posted in Inside RedAlkemi | No Comments »

How to Enhance Website Speed

Website Speed is one of the most critical diagnostics for measuring the website performance. A slow website, with a large response time is more of a turn-off in terms of user experience than a badly designed fast responding website.

We all have been developing websites, but how many times have we truly optimized it for speed? Presented below, are some simple, yet useful techniques for improving the website’s performance by improving its speed.

1.Database indexing: Faster database querying

All the avid, as well as, the not-so-avid readers know the importance of the Index Page in a book. The index of a book serves as a page, which tells you where to look for particular information inside the book. Just similarly, the index created on a database table tells the query engine exactly where to look for a particular record in the database.

The general rule of thumb for database indexes is: items that are contained in your WHERE clause are ideal to be indexed.

• Create ONE index for the multiple fields.

• Include fields in the ORDER BY clause as indexes as well. By adding indexes for your ORDER BY clauses it will prevent MySQL from having to re-sort your data each time before it is returned to you.

However, there are down falls to having too many indexes. The more indexes you have, the longer each insert statement you perform will take because MySQL needs to update the indexes to include the new data.

2.Use Cache: A repository of web pages

It is the technique in which the HTTP request fetches its response from a repository of previous responses, rather than going to the server for fetching information. The thing to be kept in mind here is:

Let the response come from the cache if the information has not changed on the server, or has not become stale, however, go to the server in case the information has changed since the last fetch.

We normally use ‘Expires’ or ‘Cache control’ headers for implementing caching.

• Expires is used for static content like images which, usually do not change regularly, and even for letting the cache know when should it refresh itself in case of dynamically (but regularly changing content).

Syntax: Expires: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 14:19:41 GMT

• Cache-Control are a special class of HTTP headers, which are more flexible and more powerful than the Expires header.

Syntax: Cache-Control: max-age=3600, must-revalidate

Visit the blog again for more information on how to enhance your website speed. To be continued…

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

A Guest Book You Shouldn’t Sign

Some sites provide a “Guest Book” section where visitors are allowed to sign in and leave comments. Many of these guest books even permit HTML code, so you can leave a link back to your site.

You might think that by signing hundreds of guest books and adding your link, you will be able improve your website’s link popularity. Unfortunately that is not the case. Guestbook links are similar to Free For All links, which are not a real value addition for website popularity and carry very little significance with popular search engines.

Guestbook links are plugged in the same category as Free For All (FFA) links because these links can be added by any one (even by script), without any human intervention. This means that no one checks the content of the site before adding the link.

So it is not a very good idea and neither is it good practice to submit your links through Guest Books. If you are a website owner and you want to integrate a Guest Book application to your website, then best practices advocate that it is better to opt for a moderated Guest Book software, where each post can be approved manually.

You can also opt for a Guest Book software which includes rel=”nofollow”, in both the URL field and the hyperlinked URL’s in the posts. Either feature can be enabled to block posts, which contain links. This allows only those visitors to post who really want to leave a relevant and valuable comment and not those who just visit Guest Books for the sole purpose of link building.

Posted in Link Building | 2 Comments »

ADOPT - Active Directories Ongoing Promotion Team

ADOPT was launched in RedAlkemi on April 1, 2010 by our COO, Ms. Anuja Lath. ADOPT is a company wide program, the basic objective of which is to enhance the SEO and SMM knowledge across the board. RedAlkemi would be promoting 460 directories through off page optimization techniques with the help of this program. However, the end goal is to attain high PageRank on all these active directories.

Promotion of these directories are being done using methods like–

•Directory Listings

•Link Building

•Bookmarking

•Press Submissions

•Social Media Marketing

•Blog and Forum postings

•Tweeting

ADOPT has created a lot of enthusiasm in the office as every RedAlkemist has adopted 4, 6, 8 or 10 directories. Color-coding has been done to identify who has adopted how many websites, for e.g. someone who has adopted 10 directories wears a black wristband whereas someone with 4 directories wears white.

Monthly reporting will be done and shared with the employees on a regular basis. Tips and Tricks to improve the PR are also shared with the employees every Friday. The employees who will be successful in increasing the PR will be rewarded and recognized every month. Also, the best performer will be rewarded on RedAlkemi’s Annual Day in December 2010.

The basic purpose of launching such a program is to build huge competitive spirit within RedAlkemi and to share knowledge and become hands-on with SEM techniques.

Posted in Blogroll | No Comments »

HR conducts placement drive at Doaba Business School

HR Team, RedAlkemi conducts one day placement drive at Doaba Business School, one of the venture of Doaba Group of Colleges near Chandigarh. The drive was mainly for MBA Marketing students (June 2010 pass out batch) for Business Analysts profile. After briefing the students about the company and the profile, we started with our interview process.

The interview process consisted of two rounds, one written test and the other was one to one interview with those candidates who passes the written test.
The written test was of 30 minutes duration followed by personal interviews wherein the knowledge, attitude, confidence of a student is evaluated and considered thereafter.

It was overall a nice experience and their training placement officer, Mr. Harpreet managed the whole event really well.

Posted in Inside RedAlkemi | No Comments »

Dance Party at RA

To celebrate the joy of achieving the overall company target for the month of March 2010, RA organized a dance party for its whole staff. The party was organized at the company’s official party center - EC, that is Entertainment Center on 9th April 2010, Friday. It started at around 7:00 pm and came to full swing at around 8:00 pm with gals and guys hitting Dance floor and grooving to latest Hindi and Punjabi tracks. Drinks and snacks were on the house.

Everyone had a really good time and have started working hard once again to get their next party soon

Posted in Inside RedAlkemi | No Comments »

Team Building Activity at RedAlkemi

Recently we started Team Building Activities for RedAlkemi employees. As always wanting to have fun and break out from the routine work pressure & stress. It has been quite refreshing for all of us here. We have always believed in learning and if it is through various activities it is all the more better.
This instills a lot of confidence in employees to learn and experience whatever they want to learn under the roof of RA.
With the help of our experienced trainer we play different games like save an egg, cricket, drawing competition between the teams and many more…all with the idea of learning something in the end and become stronger as a team.
Along with other trainings, team building activity is conducted on alternate days as a regular exercise. TBA also helps to motivate our employees to contribute on a larger scale and help RA to have a better workplace.

Posted in Inside RedAlkemi | 2 Comments »