If you pride yourself on staying on top of everything related to Search Engine Optimization – SEO, (like we do at WebFuel!) you will have heard the rumours (which were rampant across the Internet this past Spring). Google was about to include “site speed” as one of the 200 or so factors they utilize in their complex algorithms which help determine a website’s ranking in Google’s Organic Search.
Holy cow…. a taste of the “secret sauce”! We love it!
On April the 9th, Google made it official.
Speeding up websites is important – not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. 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. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.
We couldn’t agree more! As SEO specialists, we have seen our share of slow loading websites.
A large part of our traffic at WebFuel is based on organic search. A quick look at Google Analytics shows two days worth of organic traffic on webfuel.wpengine.com. Google sent us 269 visitors in 2 days who were searching for something…. something we just may have to offer.
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Part of our success in organic search is due to the ongoing efforts we place on optimizing our website for SEO. And site speed now plays a distinct factor in the equation.
There are numerous tools on the Internet which will help you determine how fast your website loads (also known as Page Speed). Some will also drill down into things to show you areas that are hindering your site from providing optimal performance.
Just in case you were wondering, we do practice what we preach. Here’s a view of our website’s performance.
Are we happy with this? No! We are constantly looking for ways to improve every aspect of our website’s SEO.
Have you considered your website’s performance lately? It is important from a Google SEO perspective.
But don’t take our word for it, check out this YouTube video from Matt Cutt on behalf of Google.
Google Ranking Factors: Is speed more important than relevance?