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!

Google And Twitter

Hi Guys

So, have you guys seen the Social Media Revolution video. It’s a must see.
http://captivate-seo.blogspot.com/2010/02/social-media-marketing.html
This is the facts.
1. Social Media took over porn as the number 1 activity on the web
2. More people (Businesses) are concern about their social media stats than their ranking on Google .
3. 1 out of 9 couples married in the us last year met via social media!
4. Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months
5. 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
6. Google is now taking Live feeds from Twitter as rankings

You will see in this image:

How Google is pulling live feeds from Twitter. The top post is a post that I made in twitter. Searching in my twitter for SEO Specialist I came across the SEO Specialist list
Made a comment and at the same time I was checking Google to see if I rank for this keyword. This is what I found.

Steven tried this with the budget speech. At it seems like an update that Google made today!

This is just another BIG FOOT down on the internet that social media is no fad and no joke. Even Google trust LIVE social media updates to help people with their searches.

So for most of the very competitive searches there is this live feed now. What you post shows in Google !

You can try it out for yourself.
Search Google for a keyword and see if the life feed is showing. Then go to your twitter account and do the same search, where you will find the conversation. Do you update and go to Google and see your Tweets displaying there.!

NOW the big question comes again!
“ DO YOU LIKE WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY ABOUT YOUR BRAND ?? “

YOU BETT ER !

As from now and very soon in the near future ! You are going to have to like what they say!

This is word of mouth ! this is marketing ! this is Social Media Marketing !

This is wh ere you and me want to be! And every other Company in the world.!!!


This is live marketing !!!


People welcome to the

WORLD OF MOUTH !!!

This is Social Media !

FACEBOOK launches in South Africa

Well, for those of you who made it to the Facebook/Habari Media Ad launch this week at the Venue in Melrose Arch, you'll know what I'm talking about.

It was amazing and inspiring. The fact that we're a part of this ever growing ever evolving online social media revolution is what excites me more than anything else in this world.

Let me just say this! It's the future of online marketing along with SEO, and incase you don't believe me, check out this video.