SEOs Improve Site Speed For Better Google Ranking

Posted Monday 12th April 2010 by Kerry in SEO.

Google are well known for bringing internet users exactly what they want when it comes to search; as such, site speed has now become a ranking factor that SEO experts must account for. Experiments conducted last year by the world famous search engine concluded that internet users like fast sites, and a difference of as little as a half a second could be enough to affect business metrics. This is important news not only for digital marketing, but also for Google as a search engine.

Site Speed

Google slowed down the time it takes for search results to come up by 100 to 400 milliseconds and discovered that the average user disengages with even the slightest delay. Not only does this make a difference between sites, it also makes a difference between search engines. This is yet another factor that Google has identified as essential to improve for themselves, to stay ahead of competitors such as Bing; and for anyone that owns a website and wants to improve site speed to have a better page listing than rivals.

SEO

Google is measuring page load speed in two ways; firstly by measuring how a page responds to Googlebot, and secondly measuring how quickly a page loads according to Google toolbar. To improve page load time server side improvements can be made. SEO specialists can enable caching on dynamic sites, optimise databases, increase server specifications, upgrade the CPU, increase server RAM and use a high quality bandwidth provider. Even if each of these adds up to shave a few milliseconds off load time, it could make all the difference to revenue.

Page Ranking

With page load time clocking in at an average of five seconds, a few milliseconds may not seem important, but this average is actually slower than a massive 70% of sites. However, Google are keen to point out that this new addition to the algorithm ranking factors is unlikely to affect more than 1% of sites, and as it has been in place for a good couple of weeks now, any sites that would have been affected by the change would have had an impact already. This update is currently only live in the United States , but we’re sure we’ll see it globally soon. Another point that Google are keen to make is that the new page rank factor, which works in conjunction with around 200 other factors should not be seen as more important than relevancy.

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