SEO and web search ranking with google now include site speed as one of 200 Signals Used to Determine Search Engine Success

Website Speed is now one of the things that Google uses to determine search rankings, (site position success) with your website, search results on Google.  Google uses over 200 signals to determine search rankings.  The full story can be read on both the MattCutts.com site, a well known Google Tech, as well as the corporate site Site Speed Announcement posted this week at the time of this posting, April 9, 2010.

Site speed has now been announced as making a difference.  These sources state that it would probably effect 1 percent of the websites rankings, but 1 percent is 1 in 100, and probably the slower sites effected.

Site Speed is now a part of Search Engine Optimization, this fresh new approach, that is actually as old as the Internet.  Site Speed can be sped up with the following in mind.  Slow websites can be a result of one or a combination of these things:

Page length – Page Length is NOT that critical if it is type content or words.  Type content does not take that much space, or data size.  It loads quickly, and has lots of valuable keywords if the content is valuable to your readers as always.  Focus on good text content!  This is a positive!

Java, Flash, these types of content with moving pictures take lots of loading time and could possibly effect your SEO and eventual search ranking because of the number of frames or pictures that are needed.  Excessive Java or Flash information will slow down a website, so a brief intro in Flash or Java is probably advisable.  Some sites could be penalized if we interpret the report this way, with excessive amounts of this non valuable search content.  These types of information are cool, but in most cases, folks are forced to wait for it.

Pictures, photos, these take data space and time to load.  This can hurt your SEO position now with the above information as our intrepretation.   The larger the photograph, the more time to load.  It is important to size photos for your project, hopefully the size that is required, with full versions in the background.  It is not advisable, and is a very large error, to take a large data size photograph and scale it to fit, meaning the data size is high.  It is much more advisable to save a smaller version in your folder, then upload both to your server, and use the smaller version as a “thumb”, or post size that you want to use.

Movie Content – Movie content if hosted by your server is hugely slow and could effect your SEO – Search Rank Position and page content loading time tremendously.  It is always advisable to add a link to a web page for large content items like movies, rather than have an automatic loading movie segment, especially on your front page.  If kept short, it is probably OK, but indeed could effect your search results as of this report.  Cool sites are not worth traffic volume, and a lower search result is much lower in traffic volume.  It is a decision you must make.

Clean HTML,  XHTML, will help search results tremendously!  When there are errors, it relies on browsers to make those corrections, and some errors can result in page error, no content shown.  When the internet was younger, these corrections were implimented for common mistakes, and were used to help read the full internet of web pages, much smaller in size at that time.  In efforts to continue with successful search engine results, the browsers such as Explorer or Firefox must continue with these repairs of your web mistakes, and in some cases, are obviously slowing down the site.  A very poorly written web site in “code and content” can take a large amount of time to load, and possibly not load at all in some browsers.  Every browser has its repairs built in.  With high errors, comes a higher level of time to load.  This will effect your search results and search rank tremendously, so clean code is always advisable.  The number of browsers has exploded too, each with a different set of website repair rules.  Phones have different browsers, all are written differently, with different repair rules.  The number of hand held browsers are vastly growing and all have different rules!  Staying with clean XHTML is always the best plan, unless you want Mobile content code and use that format.  Simple XHTML shows up well with words and links in most phone browsers, and will reset the borders to fit the screen.  Again Clean XHTML will allow the browser to read your content well, without error, and fast.  You can determine you errors on the world wide web consortium, www.w3.org

Does the Loading Speed of my Website effect the search results, search rank, or search position?  You bet! These things outlined will help you figure out what to look for in your website page loading speed.  We always recommend getting an account with google, as it will help you see the loading speed in “website loading time” reports.

Using different Themes can make a huge difference in page quality for code. Themes are frequently used in PHP / MySQL pages, and can make a monster difference in web page quality.  I will show an example.  This blog used another theme at the time of this writing, something I arbitrarily changed.  In checking the page quality, I had 75 errors!  I had a theme I modified so put it on again, and was back down to 3 errors!  The three errors are the Akismet Anti Spam indicator, and left them on so you can see it for yourself, Web Page Checker with our Forum main page.  I can delete that, but those three errors probably will not make a huge difference.  (oops, I have one of those errors.  I left it on, what did I do?) One page error can cause several page errors, so one fix can fix several problems.  You can see a perfect page  here, our hand built home page.  Type in your address in the address bar, if you have the courage.  Don’t be disappointed if  your site has errors.  It is good to be aware, and shows it needs attention to cleaner code.  All of these tools are here to help us.

Good luck and GodSpeed, for the loading speed “health” of your website.  SEO is no laughing matter, rather a huge opportunity to excel in a big increase in traffic results, many more customers, and successful internet results can result in Your Company Growth.

SEODomainNames.com

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