A slow loading website may not only deter your visitors, but in the near future may affect your search engine rankings.  In an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts, Webpronews.com recently reported that site speed may become a factor in ranking sometime in 2010.  If you think about it, it makes perfect sense.  Google wants to make the search experience relevant and fast.  The faster searchers can get the information they are looking for the better.

• While having a fast loading web site is not essential for search results now, it should still be a main focus to help your users.  If a site is not loading fast enough, there is a good chance that a user will not wait and leave the site to find information elsewhere.  In order to have a faster loading website, here are a few things you can do now to ensure a quick load time:
• Reduce images on your site. If you have an image heavy page, it will take much longer to load compared to a more search engine friendly text page.  Images are not bad to have on a page, just use them sparingly and only if they compliment the text on the page.
• Reduce excessive Java Script.
• Limit the amount of Java Script in CSS Includes.
• Change to a dedicated server or a Virtual Private Server (VPS). If you are on a shared server with many other websites, it could lengthen the amount of time it takes to load your website. Changing to dedicated server or a VPS will increase the load speed for your site.

While the above tips will get you started, Google has more information about increasing your page speed which can be found here: http://code.google.com/speed/.

So many articles and other blog posts are starting to focus on what will be new in 2010 and how search will change.  While it is good to focus on the future, let’s not forget that there is still time in 2009 to work on optimizing your website.  While search is always changing and 2010 will be a year of change and new tactics, you need to crawl before you can walk and then ultimately run.  In the next few weeks, focus on some basic items that can help your site now and well into the future.  Below are some things you can focus on right now.

• Keyword research in my opinion is one of the most important aspects to SEO.  If you are focusing your content on the wrong words and themes, people may be finding your site for the wrong reasons and then they will leave because your content is not what they expected.  Now is a great time to conduct some keyword research and make sure that your content is focusing on the right keywords and ultimately the right themes that will attract and engage new visitors.  Use Google’s free keyword tool to get an idea of what people are searching for related to your business.  Please find it here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.  

• Do you have a blog?  Are you posting to it every week like you said you would?  If not, this is a perfect opportunity to add content and more keyword relevance to your site.  As many know, blogs are inherently search engine friendly because of their structure.  Implementing a blog can also add more pages to your website which will give the search engines and ultimately your visitors more content to consume.  If you are already posting to your blog every week, are you creating content that your users want to consume?  Now is a great time to mix up the type of content you offer.  Blogs are effective because you can incorporate photos, embed videos, podcasts and more.  The greater the effort that you put into your blog, the more you will get out of it.  Before the year end, try to do something different with your blog to make it stand out from the pack by using a photo or podcast.  Shoot a video, upload it to YouTube, embed it into your blog and then write about it.  Have fun with it and you will see the rewards.  

• Another very important aspect of SEO is link building.  While link building is hard work and often is a long and strenuous process, there are some simple things you can do to at least ensure that the links you have are working for you.  If you don’t have the time to research and find new links, at least conduct a link audit of your site.  Begin by looking through your own site to make sure you don’t have any internal links that are broken.  Next you can use Yahoo’s Site Explorer, http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/, to get a good idea of what links you already have.  This tool allows you to download an excel spreadsheet of these links.  Make a schedule for the next few weeks to check out 10-15 links a day and make sure the information is still accurate and the links are still working.  If any information is incorrect, or the link is pointing to the wrong page, see if you can contact the webmaster of that site, or update your listing in a directory to ensure that you are getting the most relevance out of that link.

Fundamentals are the basis for good SEO and good website marketing.  Make sure you have these basics down before you move on to the advanced steps.  Once you have accomplished these steps, you will be positioned to take more advanced tactics.

Those familiar with Google products may already be aware of Google’s Labs.  For those that don’t know, the Labs section of Google is where they test out new features for existing products.  When checking your Gmail or Google Calendar you may have seen a tiny green beaker near the top of the page where you can see what experiments are available for the application you are using.  Often the labs will give a user more functionality or better ways of using an existing product.

To those who use Google’s Webmaster tools to monitor and analyze your website, you can now use two new features in the labs section.  These new features are “Fetch as Googlebot” and “Malware details”.  Below is an example of what it looks like in the dashboard:

Using these new tools can help you to detect more issues with your website.  The Fetch as Googlebot tool will allow you to see your website as Google sees it.  You can look at the code as Google sees it to compare it to how it should be interpreted.  Since it is coming from Google’s servers, it may look different than the source code.  If this is the case, you may have found some issues.  To run the report click “Fetch as Googlebot” and click the “success” link once it appears.

The other feature that Google is now offering is a “Malware details” function.  This new functionality can help you keep a better watch over your site.  If there is no Malware on your site, the tool will say so.  If there is Malware detected, details will be provided.  This will help you to determine if your site has been hacked and where to look to fix it.  For more information on the Malware tool, head over the Google blog for more information.