There are many search engine optimization (SEO) techniques
that bloggers and website owners could apply to be able to improve page ranking
and make websites known to a wider audience. One of the things you must not
overlook when doing SEO is ensuring that your web site has decent site speed.
Why is site speed important and what can you doing to improve yours?
Poor
Load Time Affects Readability
Google includes site speed as
one of the so-called “signals” in its page ranking algorithms, although it
“doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.” According to the Google
Webmaster Central Blog, there are currently less than 1% of search
queries that are affected by the site speed signal.
Relevance is what drives
online users, upon landing on your page, to want to know more about what your
website offers, to navigate deeper into your website pages. However, if it
takes too much time to load your site, then all the hard work you put in
producing relevant content would be wasted.
Negative
Impact for Your Website Ranking
According to an article from Moz.com, poor site speed could
negatively hurt your page ranking if your pages take a dreadful amount of time
to load. It’s something that could hit you if for instance, your relevancy
scores and link metrics are pretty close to that of your competitors’.
Enhanced
User Experience
It’s true that the negative
effect of slow site speed to your page ranking is minimal and presents no
serious cause of alarm, but you might be missing out on chances of further
improving your rank if you don’t optimize the speed of your site.
Google, as we know, aims to
provide the best experience to online users by constantly fine-tuning its
search engine results pages—awarding higher ranking to reputable sites and
“punishing” those that try to spam online users. Focus on improving your
on-site processes, as much as you implement off-site SEO techniques and you can
bet that Google, and your readers, will surely love you.
Improving
Site Speed
Smaller websites usually are
easier to optimize for site speed. There are many tools you can use for
improving site speed, many of them, Google
itself provided. To optimize the loading time and response rates of your pages,
you may also try the following basic fixes:
- The problem with your site could be not the site speed itself, but your Internet accessibility. Make sure you have fast internet connection and if that still doesn’t improve the speed by which your pages load, then you need to make some on-site adjustments.
- Combine all of your CSS into an external file and link to it from the <head> section of each page rather than loading it in the HTML of a page.
- Make sure your images are optimized for the web.
- Reduce HTTP Requests so the pages will load faster. Do this by reducing the number of items needed to be loaded for each page such as images, scripts, and style sheets.
- Combines images used in the background into one image, by using CSS sprites.
- Server side caching should be used since it creates an HTML page for a URL.
- Use Grip to compress the size of the page sent to the browser. It can also reduce the file size by up to 70%.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) system so that users can download information from your site faster. Use services like Amazon Cloud Front, which is an affordable type of CDN.
- 301 Redirects force the browser to a new URL. This requires the browser to wait for the HTTP request, slowing down your site. Lessen its use or don’t use it if possible.
- Use webmaster tools for tweaking your site speed such as Y SLOW and the HTML suggestions in Google Webmaster Tools.
Several SEO methods such as
link-building and content marketing are still considered by many as the most
essential when optimizing for search engines. If you think it’s especially needed,
however, pay special attention to improving your site speed as it can
contribute to a generally positive user experience for your website visitors.
Overall functionality and the readability of your website will create happier
visitors and will attract more guests in the future.
Resource: - http://seotipsethical.blogspot.in/2014/04/importance-of-site-speed-in-seo-efforts_6.html
