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.

There has been quite a bit of news circulating within the Search industry lately, and some of this news may have an impact on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.  In case you haven’t heard, below is quick re-cap of two pieces of important information.

Back in August, I wrote a blog about Google’s Caffeine Update.  Recently, it was announced that this update will begin to be rolled out in 2010.  Not to worry, Matt Cutts reassured webmasters in his recent blog post that the improvements to Google’s indexing infrastructure won’t occur prior to January – after the holidays.  They will release Caffeine in one data center for monitoring, prior to the full roll out.

Previously there was a preview of Caffeine available.  This preview has now been removed and this Thank You note was kindly left:

“We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox”.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”
Stay tuned as this Caffeine update approaches!

Another important piece of information is that Matt Cutts announced that Google may be adding a new factor to the over 200 factors that are currently part of their organic ranking algorithm: website load time. If you’re currently an AdWords advertiser, you may be aware that page load time already plays a role in Quality Score. In an effort to improve searchers overall experience, this too may play a role with SEO in the future. If you are interested in finding out more about how to assess your pages’ speed, you can visit: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/.

Have you ever conducted a search for your company’s most popular keywords and wondered why your site doesn’t rank very well for a particular keyword?  The next time you come across this situation, take a look at the domain names that actually are ranking well.  What do they look like?  What you might find is something like the image below:

Do you see a theme?  Notice that for the search “bicycle tires”, the keywords bicycle and/or tires are located within the domain name. When keywords are within URLs, especially the main domain name, the search engines can more easily determine that the website as a whole is about that keyword. 

This is why including keywords in your URLs is so important from a ranking perspective.  It may even make the difference between being on the first page of the search results and being hidden a few pages deep.  If your website’s main domain name does not include keywords, keep this principle in mind as you build out new pages. Where possible, include the targeted keyword(s) in the URL. For example, www.example.com/bicycle-tires

Having keywords within URLs is only one of the many components of search engine optimization (SEO).  A few of the other important aspects include making sure that the search engines can crawl your website, that there are highly relevant sites with links to your site, that are no technical issues, and that there is enough content on the site’s pages.  When focusing on SEO, it’s important to note that there isn’t one thing that you need to do; it is all of the components combined that will provide the greatest results.