A few weeks ago one of our SEO team members wrote a great blog post about how Google may soon be including web page load time as part of their ranking algorithm.  As mentioned in the blog post, Google has provided a site dedicated to providing information about improving a site’s speed: http://code.google.com/speed/

Just this week we are seeing that Google is making another step toward helping webmasters improve the speed of their websites.  In Google Webmaster Tools under Labs, there is now an experimental section called Site Performance.  This new addition to Webmaster tools shows webmasters on average how long it takes their pages to load, how that compares to other sites, and how the load time has changed over time through a trending graph.  An example of this graph is shown below.

Other details provided in this section are example pages from the website and the time that it takes those example pages to load as well as suggestions of how to optimize those pages based on the Page Speed tool. Within the Site Performance section, webmasters can also download the Page Speed tool to help optimize their site for improved speed, which ultimately leads to a better user experience.
Its important to note that this data is an average and the load time of a website’s pages can vary based on a user’s location and network conditions.

As Google is trying to make their search engine as fast as possible, it is critical that webmasters evaluate and pay attention to the time it takes pages to load, and this new Site Performance section makes it much easier to monitor.

Google has created a feature that allows videos to have captions. To be able to add captions to a video you will need to create either a caption file or a transcript file. A caption file contains two important types of information, one is the text that will be displayed in the video and the other is the information regarding the time when a specific text should be displayed in the video. A transcript file only contains text, and if the caption is in English, Google provides the option of using speech algorithms to add the captions to the video in the corresponding time it needs to be displayed.

There is software available that can create these files for you, such as MovCaptioner, Overstream or Subtitle Workshop. There is also the option of captioning yourself, but you have to keep in mind that there are different types of information which needs to be displayed such as narration, dialogue and sound effects. The files that are currently compatible with YouTube are SubView and SubRip, so make sure you obtain those types of files if you hire someone to create them for you or purchase any software.

After you create your transcript or caption file, you will need to log in to your YouTube account and add them to their corresponding video. YouTube provides a captions button that will allow you to add your file, all you need to do is select the type of file and browse for it.  

This new feature for YouTube creates a new opportunity for SEO; it will allow videos to be ranked, since the keyword in the captions will be index by search engines. Pages that have video will have a lot more text compared to a page that has video without captions, and this will allow a better rank on a search. It may also create a lot of traffic to sites such as YouTube, since they will appear more on search results.