Site Speed Now A SEO Factor

Not so long ago, I have posted an article that provided users some insights as to whether site speed is an important SEO factor or not. As of the date that article was posted, it was only rumored that Google would eventually consider your website’s loading time a factor on their search ranking algorithms. Site speed has long been considered to improve users experience and yesterday, the rumor, has been demystified.

It is now official, site speed is a new signal for determining search engine rankings. Google released the statement on their blog yesterday, announcing that site speed speed is officially in full effect. Here is an excerpt of this statement:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

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.

As you can see, it is now more important than ever to get your hands “dirty” again. Check your site speed performance and start making your website load quickly. I am sure that there are many resources you can find on the internet that will guide you on how to achieve this.

What do you think about this move? Something you already expected would happen? Can you give us some ideas on how to improve your site’s speed?