Site speed as a ranking factor

It’s Official! Site Speed is another SEO Ranking Factor!

It has happened, the speed of your website will have a direct impact on the ranking of your sites (maybe now is a good time to put some money aside for a redesign). It’s true, Google have now announced on their Webmaster Blog that the speed of your site will have an effect on your overall rankings in Google.

Now it appears that Google could be working against some large websites, especially those that have “heavy back ends” and require time to load pages. The smallest business can now make a bit of a comeback against the Brand Update (Vince) with potentially less complicated websites that load quickly.

Of course it makes absolute sense for this to become an SEO factor; people like to sift through sites that work with them, not against them. If you have certain fluidity about your site that allows customers to pass from page to page and easily through a transaction process, customers will be more likely to convert. However if your site runs slowly and it takes minutes for someone to complete a transaction or find a product that they want to read about or potentially buy, they may be put off or get bored with the wait!

Google works for the searcher and therefore the client, not for the websites that it displays. So this is just another update for the people that use Google to find products that they want. By removing or penalising the websites that take time to load then Google is doing them a favour by eliminating the sites that take up the user’s time.

There are a number of ways that this can easily be fixed though, and one simple way is putting more money into your server or hosting business. If you increase the speed of your server then your sites performance will improve as well. This can unfortunately be quite expensive so you need to look at ways of tidying up your website first. Things like Flash and image based websites need to cut down a little more to the basics and indulge in a more simplistic way of working, yet still keeping the attractiveness and beauty of their website design.

Now the overall weight that Site Speed actually has on SEO rankings may not really be all that much, and in all honesty compared with other factors like Link Saturation and on site content, Site Speed will be one of the lower ranking factors. Although this does give more weight to those sites that have been designed to help people convert and to save them time, so the general user should be happy that this has happened!

Marcus is an avid Travel SEO blogger working for a Safari holidays Tour operator, and enjoys sharing his knowledge around the world.