Google, Declares that Site Speed is a Top Priority!

Recently, it has been said that Google favors fast loading sites. It appears that there is much focus on making the end user experience as best as it can be. With that said, Google will reward sites that load fast and penalize sites that load slow. If you are rewarded, this could have a nice impact on your search engine rankings. However, if you are penalized, it will mean lower search engine rankings. It could have a negative effect on your Adwords campaign, resulting in higher costs.

On the Official Webmaster's Official Blog at Google, it states: "Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed - that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings."

There was a time that slow website/page load times were just considered as a usability issue. It was more on a nuisance and most visitors didn't pay that much attention to. However, slow loading sites and pages, tend to lose potential visitors. The main reason, it's an inconvenience to wait for the site to load. Furthermore, inconvenient or not, it had no effect on your search engine rankings.

Because search engines continue to evolve to deliver you the best search engine results, their algorithms keep changing. Furthermore, because of these changes, if you want to stay on top, you must adapt! Therefore, if ranking in the search engines is important to you, you need to be concerned about how fast your website and pages load.

It is my opinion, that you could use the site speed load time of your competitors to your advantage. All you have to do is, check their loading times and tweak your site to load faster. It should give you an upper hand as far as a search engine optimization (SEO) value. However, you'll have to monitor your rankings in the search engines to determine how much of an advantage you got.

You'll need to test your site loading speeds. There are many online services that allow you to check your loading times. It is my opinion that a site that loads slow, won't plunge to the bottom of the search results. However, it could mean that you could get bumped down 5 to 10 positions in that SERPS.

One of my favorite online tool for checking website/page loading times is, Pindom Tools. It allows me to visual look at all the page elements that are loading. It is very easy to spot such things as large image files. If an image is too large, I will look at it to determine whether or not to compress it to reduce its overall size. Compressing your website images will help to speed up your loading times.

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, "Google, Declares that Site Speed is a Top Priority!"

Spunky Jones.

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