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A Splash page is the landing, or home page, to a website that serves as an introductory or entry page. It tends to be a page containing graphics for aesthetic purposes,  with a link to enter the site proper.

From an SEO perspective, a splash page is wasted effort as it’s the page for your domain’s URL, but generally contains no text, therefore little or nothing  for search engines to index. Also, as they often have flash or graphic content, the page may take longer to load. Load speed is now a ranking factor with Google, so this is relevant to any design decisions made.

From a users perspective, the aesthetic value added tends to be more than outweighed by the negative experience of taking longer to get to the content the user is interested in.

But for those who insist on retaining a splash page, a user friendly way of achieving the same effect might be to cookie the page so that a visitor is shown it only on the first visit.

Alternatively, a lightbox effect could be used for a similar graphic effect, but could be accompanied by a fully optimised home page.

An example of a splash page is www.dunneandcrescenzi.com.

I do like the restaurants, but it takes soooh  long to find the menu and the phone no. to book, that I’m tempted to give in to a Big Mac!

LinkedIn is a professional networking platform which is free to join (although there is a premium paid service) and offers a way of connecting professionally, rather than socially – no facebook ‘funnies’ here!

It allows you present information about yourself and your professional career in a similar format to a CV and allows potential customers, employers or business collaborators to get to know that you exist for a start, and also see some relevant information about you.

With over 70m members (not as wide a net as facebook’s 500m I’ll grant you), it presents an easy way of connecting with colleagues, past and present, and former college mates also. One of the more interesting and useful features is that once connected to another person, you can see the degree of separation between you and somebody that is connected to that other person. Have you seen the film ’6 Degrees of Separation? It’s the same idea, but the emphasis is on professional relationships.

As with most social networks it offers the means to share content. This can be means of feeding your business blog through, which can be done quite easily – no IT support required! Or, you can feed your tweets through by means of an interface like Hootsuite.

But the most powerful feature so far lies in the networking possibilities of LinkedIn Groups. You can join groups that correspond to your professional interests and raise topics, ask questions, share information, gain insights and generally raise your profile. Many jobs are also posted on these Groups.

Find out more about using LinkedIn Groups:

From an SEO point of view, your profile can contain links to your website and your business blog, thus increasing your inbound links and your traffic.

Interestingly, the Digital Marketing Institute are asking for applications to their forthcoming Post-graduate Diploma in Digital Marketing to come from LinkedIn and are based on your profile there.  This is the first time I’ve heard of a social network being used in the application process for a post-graduate course! As Anthony Quigley from the DMI said: ‘If you’re lying to us on LinkedIn, you’re lying to everyone’.

And he’s right.

As with all social networks, and indeed everything on the net, the functionality is increasing all the time. One of the latest features to be added to LinkedIn is a new app by Behance allowing creative professionals to link their portfolios directly to their LinkedIn accounts.

While the rest of us were on our coffee break, Google have been busy building a new and more powerful way of indexing the web. It’s called Caffeine. Though I wouldn’t be impressed by the name – ‘caffeine’ isn’t the most powerful stimulant known to man – I guess they couldn’t call it ‘speed’!

When you do a google search, the software races off and searches the Google index of the web, not the live web itself. So the results you get are somewhat out of date. However, Caffeine provides the ability to index greater amounts of content, of different types eg. video, at a much faster pace.

As Google have said:

… every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second.

One of the advantages of Caffeine for SEO consultants and those responsible for website traffic has been that the number of inbound links being shown on the Google Webmaster Tools has increased.

The number and quality of inbound links to a website is a critical SEO factor. So the availability of a more up to date and comprehensive picture of your inbound links is all good news.

You can read more about Caffeine on the Google Blog.

Have you seen more links on your Google webmaster tools report?

Come back next week for a post on how to create more inbound links.