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Is your site fast enough for Google?
The search engine giant has recently added site speed to its algorithm, taking into account the speed at which a web site responds to web requests. A site with faster load time will be more likely to rank higher than a similar site that has lagging pages.
Until now, Google has evaluated relevance (how pertinent a page is to the actual search) and authority (the number and quality of inbound links to a website) as the two main factors to determine page rank. However, web site speed is also a significant component of search rankings. Google presents two main reasons for adding site speed to their algorithm.
Better User Experience
According to Google's research, the slower a site responds to a click, the less time a visitor will spend there. Site speed ultimately defines a user's experience, making it a fundamental piece of the puzzle that web designers/owners should focus on. It makes sense to include site speed in determining page rank -- not only do visitors want relevant and quality results, but they also want results that will present information quickly.
Reduced Operating Costs
Increasing site speed can have a significant effect on a company's bottom line. A Shopzilla case study showed that when a website sped up by 5 seconds after a redesign, there was a 25% increase in page views, a 7-12% increase in revenue, and a 50% reduction in hardware. More examples have shown that faster websites have more queries and visits per user, while slower websites have less searches as well as negative long-term effects -- users remember the lagging site and are reluctant to visit it even after load times have increased.
What does this mean for marketers? Speed matters. Your website load time can be the difference between the first and second page of Google. There are numerous best practices for speeding up your website, from minimizing HTTP requests to moving scripts to the bottom of a page. There are also several free tools to help you evaluate the current speed of your site:
- Page Speed -- Firefox/Firebug add-on from Google that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions on how to improve them.
- YSlow -- Firefox/Firebug add-on from Yahoo that analyzes web pages and suggests ways to better performance.
- WebPageTest -- Provides waterfall of page load performances as well as a comparison against an optimization checklist.
- Google Webmaster Tools -- Provides detailed report about page visibility on Google as experienced by user around the world.
Although site speed has become integrated into the algorithm, Google still puts tremendous emphasis on
relevance and authority as the basis of rankings. The addition of site speed will only affect a small percentage of search queries performed. Therefore, it is still important to create valuable content and build inbound links that will return the best user experience for the visitor.
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