Site Speed: Google’s Latest Ranking Factor

May 5, 2010 | By eric | 6 Comments »

It’s Official.We all need Speed…for our blogs in order to rank high on Google’s search page.

web speed

Google announced on April 09,2010 that they incorporated site speed as one of the over 200 signals in determining the position of a website in the search results.

According to Google Webmaster Central blog, they launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing and not too many people noticed it.

Google’s Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only a few percentage of websites:

“Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don’t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that ‘We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.’

The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.”

7 Tips to better optimize your blog and keep it listed in Google search results.

There are a number of articles on the internet on best practices for improving your website’s load and response times. Below are just some of the proven tips that you can easily apply to improve the speed of your blog.

  1. Use Google Page Speed tool to speed up your site. You can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of your blog pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
  2. Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. Slow servers can cause problems.
  3. Use as few images and videos as possible on your blog .
  4. Make sure that all images have height and width tags.  The tags will make sure that the browser knows the size of the image before loading it.
  5. Use media content provider such as Flicker and YouTube to host your media images and videos instead of loading them on your webhost.
  6. Use only the plugins you really need, and delete the rest.
  7. Delete unnecessary PHP tags and database access.  Convert some PHP commands to HTML.

Blog reader wants immediate results. Most Internet users will just skip a site altogether if it fails to load within a couple of seconds. Even if, they are just dropping your EC button or clicking on your Adgitize widget. The faster your  blog pages load, the more readers of your blog will be.

If you need more explanation on how to apply these tips, I’ll be happy to elaborate them one by one. Just make sure to wear your seat belt when applying these tips :)


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