Google uses page speed as ranking factor

Excerpt from Axandra.com;

Last Friday, Google announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results:


"As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...]

We've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites."

Will your website rankings drop?

Google's Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:

"Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don?t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that 'We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.' The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change."

While 1% does not sound much, it can be a problem if your website belongs to the pages whose rankings will drop. At this time, Google's new site speed signal only applies to visitors searching in English on Google.com.

How to keep your web pages listed in Google search results

There are several things that you can do to improve the speed of your web pages:

1. Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A "cheap" web host could cause problems.
2. Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
3. Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
4. Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
5. If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
6. Use as few images as possible on your website and compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.
7. Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.

The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will be able to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient people. The average web surfer wants immediate results.

Page speed is not Google's most important ranking signal. The end of Google's page speed announcement contains a very important sentence: "While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page."
It is important to optimize the speed of your web pages but it's also important to optimize all other elements of your web pages if you want to be listed on Google's first result page. IBP's Top 10 Optimizer analyzes all important ranking elements/signals that lead to high rankings on Google, including page speed and many other factors.

Don't forget the basics of web design when doing SEO

W3C web standards...
My team of SEO guru's at Traffic Fundi are really good at what they do. I'll go so far as to say that they're some of the best SEO boys in South Africa, but it's amazing how you get so caught up in "SEO'ing" we website that you often forget the basics.

I've been trying to get a website ranking for over a month now. This site has been SEO'd to perfection "so we thought".

What we'd forgotten to check, and it's the basics of basics in web programming and website design is we forgot to check the code. Now this is a first for us, and I didn't realise how much Google could penalise you for having bad or broken code on your website. In fact the penalties were so bad that it's take Google 2 months to come back and re index my website.

How I managed to pick this up was by using the W3C Validator. This great piece of software and Tool that is advertised on almost every online marketing and SEO related website in the world :), picked up that we had META DATA in the header section of the site that was not closed off. Picked up that we had code that was broken and various other small snippets that needed to be fixed.

So, in an attempt to remind everyone about the basics of web design and SEO.
Today's SEO lesson is: Although SEO's may think it's all about back links and content, DON'T FORGET TO CHECK YOUR CODE!

Essential Steps to successful SEO - 301 Permanent Redirects!

If there's one thing that makes me sad :(, it's seeing people loose their site rankings! I've seen it numerous times over the last couple of weeks and disaster recovery is not always a simple process so... I decided to start writing the "Essential steps to successful SEO" guide for those of you interested. If you're not, then try reading something on SA Property News ;-).


Something I do know, having been in the SEO game for a couple of years, is that getting your site to the TOP of the rankings comes with alot sweat, hard work & effort! The rewards are amazing & gratifying and seeing client climb from NOWHERE to SOMEWHERE is a feeling that's untouchable (I know what you're thinking, it comes close).

So, why 301 redirects? And more importantly why Permanent 301 redirects?

Here's a scenario! You have a website trafficfundi.com and it's been running for 5 years. It's also been generating 4000 hits a day, but your business decides to re brand and change company names to trafficwizard.com (think this sites available). One of things you need to do is a website redesign and restructuring, which also means moving the site to a new domain.

You spend R300 000 on a website(ripped off once again) and switch everything over to the new domain (At this point you've totally forgotten about marketing or haven't even thought about it yet). 3 weeks later, you're getting 4 hits a day and you can't understand why, so you phone the SEO guru's and bitch about spending R10 000 to fix it!

So here's where 301 redirects (The essential SEO tip) come into play.

If you do a "site:www.trafficfundi.com" in Google, it will tell you how many pages you have indexed in the Google index. When you move your website to the new domain, all those pages listed in the Google index HAVE TO MOVE ACROSS. If you don't move them across, or you don't redirect those pages to the new domain name, you're going to get a error page, saying sorry this page no longer exists! This means:

1. You're going to loose all the PR that those pages had
2. All the links (whether you built the links or not) no longer have any validation. This alone means that people linking to your old site are going to get penalised for linking to a broken link.
So think about all the other sites you're damaging in the process!!!
3. You're going to P!$$ Google off!

So ensure, that if you delete a page (you think about who is linking to that page - and whether or not THEY need it! A sure way to Successful SEO: Always always always use 301 PERMANENT redirects when moving sites or pages!

Thanks to Bruce Clay for an awesome page on how to 301 permanent redirect anything!!!!http://www.bruceclay.co.za/newsletter/0405/redirects.html