Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, suggested that page speed will soon become a ranking factor in Google search results. Speed has been a consistent factor for comapnies for quite some time now. It is quite evident that Google is giving considerable importance to page speed after all, to improve the user experience by delivering the best possible results. The quicker Google can crawl you, the quicker your results will appear.
Is using the speed factor a good idea?
Webmasters do welcome this idea of speed being used as a ranking feature in Google. But many feel that it might only benefit corporations and negatively impact the small people who might never end up reaching anywhere in the search engines. Moreover it can become a political issue as small nations whose internet infrastructure is poorer than technological developed nations. It also depends upon the affordability of the service and those who can afford a high quality bandwidth and dedicated servers stand more chance of a better page rank.
Many sites today have video blogs, rich content, and that definitely takes time to load. Once the search engines decide on the speed factor, these sites will be affected. All said and done this speed factor is sure to be a significant factor in the search results shortly and we can only follow the best tips offered by none other than Google itself for better site performance using its webmaster tools. This tool demonstrates a cumulative speed numbers, based on the frequently visited pages with the activated page rank feature. .
It’s highly recommended that you monitor the load times over a select period. If you see high load times then examine the factors that could be impacting your site. Poor design, too much rich content, bad website hosting provider? All issues that should be addressed.
One more page is included which is Page speed suggestions where Google lets you know the areas where your page has to be optimized for better speed performance. Google’s Page Speed Firefox/Firebug plug-in is used to find these suggestions.