Is your ecommerce site a breeze to use? Is it fast to download? Does it render (paint) quickly on the screen? If not, is the HTML at least built to display the most important parts of the page first?

You can trim precious seconds off the download time by removing superfluous HTML code, optimizing your images, and converting any tables-based layouts to CSS-based (Cascading Style Sheets) instead. Especially ditch any nested tables. Superfluous code includes such things as programmer comments, commented-out copy/code, redundant font tags, inline JavaScripts and inline CSS. The latter two can, in most cases, be moved to a .JS file and .CSS file, respectively. MS FrontPage is notorious for adding 'code bloat' to your pages. Optimizing your images for fast download includes not just choosing the best compression format and compressing them to the largest extent possible (using Photoshop, Fireworks, or whatever your tool of choice is) without noticeable degradation in the image quality, but also defining height and width attributes on all your images. And if you're still using 1-pixel GIFs as placeholders to align things on your pages, it's time to leave that technique where it belongs... in the '90s! A tool like Dr. Watson or NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox can also help you in your HTML streamlining efforts.

The web team at Verizon Information Directories who operate the top online yellow pages site SuperPages.com, are really clued in to SEO. (I should know since they're one of our clients!). So you could imagine my delight when Chris Smith, who heads up the team there, accepted my offer to become a contributing blogger at Natural Search Blog. Chris has entered the blogosphere with a bang, contributing some awesome posts on SEO over the past couple of weeks:

• Need more traffic? Try Image Search Optimization
• New Domain Names for Brands - Very Limited
• Afraid of Click Fraud? Try Pay-For-Call
• Google Releases New Related Links Feature
• Plenty of Traffic
• Optimize your roof ads for Google Maps (a tongue-in-cheek post)

Great posts! The ones on optimizing for Google Images and on pay-per-call are particularly meaty.

I am looking for a couple more contributing bloggers for Natural Search Blog. So if you fancy yourself an SEO expert and would like to blog, please drop me a note at stephanmspencer@gmail.com.