Site Speed is now a ranking factor

Don’t take it from me. Matt Cutts of Google fame has revealed it on his blog – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/

The quickness of your page downloading has always been an important usability factor. Now Google have expanded it to mean much more.

Everybody wants the page they click on to load quickly. Slow loading pages lead to many abandoned searches. These type of search listings frustrate the user experience. Google would like to force improvements in this general area to make their search results more helpful to the user.

How Fast am I Going?

To check out the speed of your site and to gain some valuable insights on how to improve your site speed then check out what Google thinks of it at – Google Webmaster Tools.

Goto >> Labs >> Site Performance

GWT allows you to analyse your sites performance. GWT will tell you how your site compares to other websites and it will give suggestions on how to improve your site speed.

For JumpStart marketing.ie, on average, pages in our site take 1.5 seconds to load. This is faster than 85% of sites.

Just to show that we are far from perfect at JumpStart the areas we need to improve on are:

• Enable Gzip Compression

• Combine External JavaScript

• Minimize DNS lookups

• Combine External CSS

Taking Action!

Now before you go adjusting your SEO strategy to make site speed your no.1 focus you need to remember that this is one of over 200 factors that Google takes into account. Matt also says that this factor is weighted very low in comparison to relevancy factors. Keep your SEO strategy as it is but be aware of this new ranking factor and reduce your website’s code clutter where possible:

5 simple Ways of improving your download speed include:

1. Image Compression & Reduction – Make sure that you compress all your images as much as possible and don’t use images where text will do.

2. External JavaScript – Create external .js pages for any JavaScript programs you are running on your page. Link to these externally.

3. Use External CSS styling – All styling elements should be stored externally and linked into your web page. Do not use nested tables. Instead use a layer based layout.

4. Meta Tags – Don’t clutter up your tag with lots of useless Meta tags. Most of them are of no use when it comes to ranking.

5. Limit your use of large files such as Flash files, Video files. These can be really large and if they are not essentail to your website then leave them out