Page speed

[TWR]

Anyone use Page Speed Home to test their page speed out? All things being equa,l I think the faster you can load a page the better you'll do in the SERPS. However, I'm curios if any of you seo ers really take this into account when building out your pages? Do you try to keep the page under a size limit and do you find that faster web hosting makes any difference in the SERPS?

[c14h20o4]

Hiya Tim,

I haven't used that Google thing before but Google has said, Landing page load time will soon be incorporated into Quality Score - Inside AdWords (I realize this is for adwords, they mentioned before that load time would affect rankings too but I can't find the exact source at the moment), they do give slight preferences to pages that load quicker (differences in load times would have to be huge to see a ranking advantage). I do take that into account when creating pages. This really only comes into effect though when you're serving something other than text, like images. In general, I try to keep images below 100kb. As far as hosting goes, reputable and reliable are above speed. And, all of the focus on improving speed is really about user experience rather than trying to manipulate google.

Hope that helps,
Chris

[TWR]

Thanks Chris

[allenM]

Hi..

There has been a lot of talk about the effects of page speed on SEO lately, so I thought I’d set the record straight. For those of you who don’t know about page speed, it is the time it takes for your website to load. We all know that some websites take ages to load, while others are extremely fast.

I have noticed a number of blogs and videos that discuss page speed and whether or not it is a ranking factor. In a recent post in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, it has been confirmed that page speed is indeed a ranking factor.

The reasoning behind this is that a page that loads faster, doesn’t make a user wait for long time to view the information on the page. Because they don’t waste a user’s time, the user’s experience is improved. Therefore, fast-loading websites deserve to have higher ranking results.