Another little known factor that Google Takes into search engine ranking

[cellcom]

Let me preface this post by saying "I HATE SEO!". I hate everything about it - it is tedious, confusing, constantly changing, boring, and a royal pain in the ass.

Unfortunately, the reality is, while I really don't want to become an "SEO Expert", in order to make the kind of money I do online I am forced to play the Google SEO Game.

So, if all of you weren't confused enough (or have enough to worry about) here is one factor I am sure many of you were not aware of - "Site Speed".

Yes, as google admits "Google is obsessed with speed". They go on to say "Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests."

I am not going to go over the whole thing, rather I will just point you to Matt Cutts blog post on the subject here:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking

I will be interested to hear your comments on the matter.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

Yes indeed, it was discussed at length months ago.

[Gene Pimentel]

Speed is increasingly becoming more important, but is just one factor in getting good rankings.

[Aussie_Al]

So true!

Some webmasters seem to forget half the nation is still on dial up and not high speed connections

[connorbringas]

Wow that seems kind of stupid...i feel like they keep making up new ways to rank websites

[DavidO]

Site response time is super-important and many people neglect it at their peril.

Okay, there are many other important SEO basics but if you've covered all these and are still looking for a boost then address your site's speed.

I recently switched to high-performance VPS hosting and it seriously boosted my SERPs.

[Gene Pimentel]

Originally Posted by connorbringas

Wow that seems kind of stupid...i feel like they keep making up new ways to rank websites

Why is it stupid? Google is in the business of providing the best search results. Faster websites increase the satisfaction of the person searching.

And of course they "keep making up new ways to rank websites". That's what their purpose is!

[zhoom]

I think most SEO consultant have already know that. If I'm not mistaking its been a topic month\s ago.

[HCLee]

A quick way to help improve your blog load up time is to install the wp plugin W3-Total-Cache. It helps to keep the data on cache and any future request for the same data can be pulled up from the cache instead of your server. This increases the speed of your page being loaded.

[bgmacaw]

"While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page."

"Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal"

In other words, your site has to be a real bandwidth pig or on an awfully bad server plus your content has to suck as well for this to impact your ranking.

[jacky212]

Google announced the new ranking factor months ago. The site loading speed greatly affects the satisfaction of an user visiting the website. If Google bot has the same mental state of an average user and highly complicated to understand. If your hate SEO for the constant alg updation, you are not fit to be one.

[jusin]

Originally Posted by jacky212

Google announced the new ranking factor months ago. The site loading speed greatly affects the satisfaction of an user visiting the website. If Google bot has the same mental state of an average user and highly complicated to understand. If your hate SEO for the constant alg updation, you are not fit to be one.

Yes, it is true that loading time of a website do affects everything and the visitors get disrupted. This is also one of reason, why google dont crawls the site.

We cant predict or know, when Google will crawl a site and what changes they make in the algo. but, we can only make some changes in the site for making it rank well in the search engine.