Site Speed Could Effect Rankings

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/.