Last week, Google officially announced on their blog that “we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.” What does this mean to webmasters and practitioners of SEO? Not much really, when you take into account that most good SEOs already consider site speed to be a huge part of their optimization efforts. After all, the quicker your site loads, the easier it is for the search engines to get to the most important pages on a site. Site speed is obviously also good for user experience and keeping those bounce rates at a low level.

However, the reason it may be more prudent for the less fastidious SEO to speed up page load times is that the load times are now part of the algorithms in that even if you have a site with great content and inbound links, if your pages take forever to load, Google may see fit to not rank you as high. What are some of the basic housekeeping tips to speed up page load times?

Steps for speeding up a website include: Removing or minimizing CSS, JavaScript and tables where you can, minimizing redirects by making your application update URL references whenever resources change their location and trying to use the least amount of comments code. Google has even provided a list of resources to help webmasters with all of the page speed best practices: http://code.google.com/speed/.  

There have been a lot of changes within the search industry lately.  One interesting change is that the Google is now incorporating real-time information within their search engine results pages. Google made this announcement earlier this month and these real-time results include tweets from Twitter and information from other sources such as Facebook, blogs, news articles, and more.

To see the real-time results within Google’s search results page, try conducting a search for a keyword that is popular, such as President Obama. Keep in mind that these live updates will not be displayed for every keyword that is searched. Below is an image of the scrolling area on the results page when I conducted a search for President Obama.  This scrolling area updates automatically as you view the page.

As you can imagine, there is way too much information circulating on the web and within social networks to include every bit of relevant information on the search engine results page. Therefore, Google states that they apply “its own measurements to those whose updates appear in real-time results. Retweets and the number of followers a person has factor into Google’s assessment of quality.” 

With this update, there are still a few questions. How useful is this information going to be for searchers?  When people conduct searches in Google, are they really looking for the latest news or conversations about that topic?  How accurate is the information displayed within this scrolling area on the page?  Will it encourage businesses to focus more heavily on online reputation management? How will this impact SEO and the race to get to the top of the page now that this scrolling box takes up some of that real estate on the page?

Here at MoreVisibility we’ve talked about the importance of incorporating social media into online marketing initiatives for quite some time now. With these recent updates, it is even more important than ever.

We may not be thrilled all of the time with the search results that Google, or any search engine displays. However, who are we to blame for poor results?  What if the pages that are listed reflect poorly on your company or brand?  What if the content has the potential to deter customers or prospects?  Who should be responsible for this content? Should Google be to blame?  A recent case involving London-based Metropolitan International Schools (MIS) may have set the standard for potential cases that arise against search engines in the future. 

MIS tried to sue Google UK and Google, Inc. for the defamatory comments and complaints posted to an online forum about the company.  What is interesting, and very true, is the following statement:

“When a snippet is thrown up on the user’s screen in response to his search, it points him in the direction of an entry somewhere on the Web that corresponds, to a greater or lesser extent, to the search terms he has typed in,” Justice David Eady said. “It is for him to access or not, as he chooses. [Google] has merely, by the provision of its search service, played the role of a facilitator.”

This instance makes us reflect not only on our online reputation, but also on how the search results truly are simply an amalgamation of content that is relevant to a specific keyword that was searched. So, if Google’s not to blame for the results, who is?

The verdict is that if someone feels they have been offended or harmed in some way by content that Google is indexing, they should address their concern to the person who wrote and published the material. Google is not a publisher of content. Google is only a tool to bring a variety of relevant information to the searcher.

Keeping online reputation management in mind, there are things that you can do to help maximize the real estate on the search results pages with content that you have greater control over.  First, ensure that your website is optimized for search.  You want to be able to reserve those top two links for your own website’s listings.  Also, look to social media. Social media profiles, including LinkedIn company pages, Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages, and YouTube channels all have the potential to rank well for brand name search queries.  So while you may not be able to control everything that is said on the internet, be sure to maximize the presence of pages where you do have a bit more control.  This will enable you to own more space than the listings that one website can cover. This not only helps with branding, but it can also build a positive impression of your brand by providing places for you to host compelling and engaging content for searchers to find.