Decrease Page Load Time to Increase SEO Performance in 2010

Earlier this month at PubCon in Las Vegas, Google's search quality aficianado, Matt Cutts, was interviewed about some upcoming changes with the Google algorithm. Along with their Caffeine rollout, Google will be starting to take load times into consideration when determining a site's ranking. While many were expecting this, as load time is one of the primary focuses of the recent update, this was the first time it was officially confirmed by the 'oh so secretive' Google engineers.

Matt Cutts was interviewed and confirmed that along with their Caffeine rollout, Google will be starting to look at load times and taking a site's speed into account with their ranking algorithms. We were all kind of expecting this, as it is one of the primary focuses of Google's Caffeine update.

The major theme from this interview is not to panic. This will be just one factor that can impact ranking results. Additionally, this rollout will be a gradual one and really won't take full effect until 2010.

Here's what this pending update means to website managers and developers. Like so many aspects of your overall marketing program, speed is paramount. Speed to market, speed to react to customer queries and complaints, and now the speed of your website. Site administrators must take into account not only the size of the page but the size of images on a page. Additionally, extraneous media and scripting can cause slower load times. Ideally, the entire page load including all external calls etc should be 100kb or less, in accordance with Google's guidelines. Here are the three main things to consider with respect to file size and site speed:

• File size of page code
• File size of images rendered on a page
• The number of requests the page makes to other files on the site including calls to css/js/feeds etc.

Much like other Google updates, this one aims to make the experience better for Googlers and, potentially, your own site visitors. Here are some tools you can use to monitor page speed and size.

• LORI (life of request info) - A firefox plug-in that tells you how long it takes to load a page.
• Page Speed - A firefox/firebug add-on that provides feedback to developers on page performance.
• WebPageTest.org - Pretty simple. Enter page URL and get page load performance with an optimization checklist.
• Closure Compiler - a simple tool to help you reduce the size of your JavaScript files.

About the Author: Chris Sietsema

As Director of Interactive Marketing, Chris oversees day-to-day digital marketing responsibilities including search engine optimization, paid search advertising, social media, email marketing and media buying.

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