How Page Speed & Load Time Effects SEO

Posted by David • Apr 6th, 2011 4:46:43 pm - Subscribe | Mood: good | Music: No Music

Article contains information on how page speed load times can effect SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Well many of us who design for the web would not obviously think that our web page speed would play a role in Search Engine Optimization, but it does. For those of you who already know this please bare with me.

How Page Speed Effects SEO
Google recently released page speed in the efforts that webmasters and developers optimize thier web pages for the best user experience. Why is this impordent to Google? Well think about it, if you go to a website and the page takes 15 seconds to fully load what are the chances that you will view it's content? Not likely.

It's important to Google to give you the best, fastest, most relative content first and foremost before all others. Google's algorithm only that judges page rank and SERP only constitutes for a small bit of SEO, but that small bit can place you above your competitors, and at the end of the day...isn't that what we all want?

So what can I do to improve my page speed and lower your page load times for your users? Well it's best that I list them out.

Optimize your CSS code

Optimize your images for speed

Optimize your javascript code

Optimize your web server (apache mod_pagespeed)

Get rid of un-needed line breaks

GZIP your website's pages.

Use images sparingly

Use flash content sparingly per page

Stay aware from slow loading ad servers (if you have ads you our pages)

It is said that Google expects that all pages (especially ecommerce domains) Optimize their web pages to 15k. Yes, that's right 15 kilobytes! Pretty crazy huh?

As always if you have any comments feel free to comment and I will do my best to respond to your questions.

Tool's to improve your Page Speed

Google Page Speed Online Labs

Google Page Speed Extension for Chrome

Google Page Speed Extension for Fire Fox

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