SEO Blog

If your pages aren’t loading quick enough, people will get bored and leave. It doesn’t matter how exciting your content is, how great your products are, if they can’t see them, they won’t know – or care.

Therefore your site has to be functional as well as optimised. The fact that Google and most other search engines have integrated site speed into their ranking factors is something of a blessing. Now sites that aren’t serving their visitors’ needs aren’t seeing any benefit.

This has put the focus on the usability and functionality of a site and brought it into the context of SEO.
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The SEO industry doesn’t stand still. As is evidenced by the recent Google Instant update [see: Why Google Instant Won't Destroy SEO], anything can come along and shift the focus of the work done and the way in which you have to approach optimisation. For this reason your efforts to educate yourself on SEO should never stop.

Google could announce tomorrow that inbound links from sites of PR 2 or below won’t count towards your site’s overall strength anymore. As unimaginable as that is (both in the sense of the content of the announcement and the fact that Google would make it in the first place), the need to keep up with the latest thinking on the subject and amend your understanding is vital.
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Google have finally confirmed that site speed has become a ranking factor. On the Webmaster Central Blog, the search giant discusses why it is important that websites are fast, whilst also suggesting a few tools to help you track your speed.

As expected, their algorithm has been updated to incorporate this much-mooted change. This means that websites that are particularly slow may soon find that their rankings suffer as a consequence. Whilst this is clearly an important issue, it isn’t something that you need to be overly concerned with.

I previously discussed a few methods for getting your site up to pace with the competition in a post entitled, Improving Site Speed and Search Rankings. This should give you a push in the right direction when it comes to optimising for page load time. However, you don’t need to panic.
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The issue of page load time probably seems about as detached as you could probably get from traditional SEO, or at least it will if you have missed the recent news emanating from Google HQ. Yes, site speed is about to become a ranking factor.

As with any ranking factor, site speed will now come under the broader search engine optimisation umbrella. Now that a slow page load could be detrimental to other SEO efforts, it is essential that any issues are identified and corrected to ensure you don’t suffer a drop in rankings.
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With the revelation that Google is likely to adopt page load time as a ranking factor, it begs the question: what else are they measuring on your site? Search engine algorithms are a closely guarded secret and very few are privy to the most intimate of details, especially not the ranking factors, of which there are reputed to be hundreds.

For anybody looking to optimise a website, a basic understanding of ranking factors is essential. What is known of these algorithmic determiners has been discovered through various messages from the search engines or decoded through extensive research and shared amongst the SEO community. So what do we know?
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