Google’s Continuing Quest to Increase Page Speeds

 

July 30, 2011

Here’s a valuable limited time offer from Google.

For higher performance, Google might complementarily evaluate your Web site for download speed and will enter new code that will make your site faster for enhanced user enjoyment. Google’s service is temporarily being offered to a select number of Web sites.

This process will enhance your site’s prominence on the No. 1 search engine, and it will enable Google to operate at a faster rate for users.

Google’s goal is to enable sites to download more quickly by as much as 60 percent.

“Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe,” according to Google.

“The extent of speed up depends on a variety of factors such as content on your pages, browser, geographic location of access, bandwidth, etc.,” Google explains.

On its page-speed service page, Google also provides a link for you to test your site’s speed. Most tests take less than five minutes.

“The test involves rendering your website on the selected browser by directly visiting your site, and repeating the same test by proxying your site through Page Speed Service,” Google says.

Again, better hurry, soon there will be a charge for the accelerating the speed of your site’s download.

“Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later,” Google adds.

For all the details in Google’s offer, visit Page Speed Service.

From the Coach’s Corner, here are resource links to help your site’s Google presence:

In SEO, Your Site’s Download Speed Matters to Google

Google Insights – 23 Key Questions about Your Web Site

The Key to Internet Dominance: Think Integration

“The Internet is the Viagra of big business.”

-Jack Welch

 

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 Columnist Terry Corbell is also a business-performance consultant and profit professional. Click here to see his management services (many are available online). For a complimentary chat about your business situation or to schedule Terry Corbell as a speaker, why don’t you contact him today?

 

 

In SEO, Your Site’s Download Speed Matters to Google

 

April 12, 2010

How fast does your Web site download? Google recently announced that it determines site rankings, in part, by download speed.

“We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc. — all the factors that you probably think about all the time,” wrote Google software engineer  Matt Cutts in a recent blog.

“Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight,” he added.

But another blog, Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, also mentioned site speed: “But faster sites don’t just improve user experience, recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”

Personally, I wonder if being fast qualifies as a green initiative.

The official Google also makes these suggestions:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Mr. Cutts also wrote that Google’s official blog provides even more tools.

“…Google’s webmaster console provides information very close to the information that we’re actually using in our ranking,” he added. “In addition, various free-to-use tools offer things like in-depth analysis of individual pages. Google also provides an entire speed-related mini-site with tons of resources and videos about speeding up websites.”

He also says “big sites” will not get a competitive advantage in the added factor of site speed.

“Often even a little bit of work can make big differences for site speed,” explained Mr. Cutts. “So I think the average smaller web site can really benefit from this change, because a smaller website can often implement the best practices that speed up a site more easily than a larger organization that might move slower or be hindered by bureaucracy.”

In addition to downplaying load speed, he emphasized Internet users would appreciate the fastest-possible user experience.

“…this change highlights that there are very constructive things that can directly improve your website’s user experience,” he concluded.” Instead of wasting time on keyword meta tags, you can focus on some very easy, straightforward, small steps that can really improve how users perceive your site.”

My sense is that site speed does indeed play a vital role in search engine optimization. If you haven’t already, you might want to make certain that your site downloads fast as possible.

From the Coach’s Corner, for more tips on ranking well on Google, here’s another Biz Coach column: “Achieving Strong Results on Google Now Easier with Social Networking.”