Site Speed To Influence SEO Success in 2010

A recent round table discussion in Manchester has identified speed as a major factor in improving SEO results in 2010. At the talks were leading figures from UKFast, Oomagoo, CSI Media as well as High Position’s Commercial Director, Terry Heffernan.

While creating high quality, unique content was held up as an ongoing aim, it is the speed at which that content is delivered that will be of significant importance this year, according to participants.

Managing Director of UKFast, Lawrence Jones, who also provided the venue for the discussions, said, “I think it is a given that content is very important, but now it is about the delivery of that content. I think Google is putting it higher up the search engine in its priorities and as far as I’m concerned it is about location, location, location – where the server is located and how we can deliver that packet of information faster than anyone else.”

Load time was also highlighted as a major factor by Matt Cutts at the recent PubCon 2009 event in relation to its algorithm. The Adwords Quality Score already takes speed into consideration, and Google has placed a great deal of emphasis on speed as regards Chrome and Caffeine.

As always, the user experience is foremost in Google’s plans; speed will be something that consumers come to expect from websites. Failure to include this in any SEO campaign is likely to adversely affect results within search.

Terry Heffernan agreed, “By talking to our technical teams certainly we see that speed is going to be more important and it could be a window of opportunity. Speed is one of the elements of SEO but it is about fine-tuning the whole machine to deliver the best performance.”

The most effective approach to SEO in 2010 will require expert implementation of social media, blogs, press releases and video content – as well as load time.