Your Google Ranking May Rely on the Site’s Speed

Google has once again added another feature to its ranking algorithm: site speed. Now, not only is it important to have SEO-friendly websites with relevant content, keywords and easy navigation, but it is also important that your site load quickly!

Google looks at it this way. If a site is slow to respond or load, the searcher will have a negative experience. Always looking to make searching convenient, accurate and informative, this negative experience does not fly with Google. Faster sites create happy users.

There are many tools available to evaluate the speed of your site. The following tips were suggested directly from the experts at Google:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.
• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

Although site speed will be taken into consideration, relevancy of the page content still trumps all search requirements. Currently, less than one percent of search queries are affected by the new addition. Also, only searches in English are considered.
Test your site speed and make sure your site is achieving its maximum potential in search results.
Netwave Interactive Marketing employs a team of highly trained web designers and search engine optimization experts. Need help improving your site’s speed or rankings in Google? We’ll help you turn that around and get ahead of your competitors.