Red Bricks Media: Google Site Speed Announcement: Not Time to Panic - Stan Wang - MediaBizBloggers

The latest news in the SEO world is that Google recently announced that they are including site speed as a factor in their ranking algorithm. "Site speed" is defined simply as how quickly a website responds to web requests. Before we talk about the implications of this change let's go over a few important facts as mentioned by Google:

· Page relevance is weighted much more heavily

· The changes were launched "a few weeks back"

· Fewer than 1% of search queries are affected

· Currently only applies to English searches on google.com

Now of course the obvious question is - what does this mean for my SEO efforts?

Borrowing from the Google Search Quality Team's Principal Engineer, Matt Cutts, the first order of business is: don't panic.According to Google, this change has affected a very small percentage of search queries.

Casual observation would support this attitude as well. Few if any people even noticed the change when it was rolled out around early March. Unsurprisingly, we have not seen any unexpected changes in our clients' rankings at Red Bricks. With nary a change in search engine results, the time to hit the panic button is not now.

Google also mentions that relevancy factors are still weighted much more heavily than site speed. That means things like keyword relevance, site authority, and backlinks -. i.e., all the things a good SEO program has been doing all along - are still the most important factors for ranking.

Does this mean there that nothing should be in done in response to this algorithm change? Certainly not! Google uses a multitude of factors to rank pages and it is important to do well in as many of them as possible. While it is difficult to pinpoint precisely what Google may be looking for in a newly released factor, we can definitely approximate site speeds by looking at the page load times of the top performing sites out there. The slowestof top performing sites generally have page load times of up to seven seconds. A good rule of thumb for your website's pages is to outperform this bottom quartile and have page load times of less than 7 seconds. Ideally, your page load times would be clocked at under 4 seconds. There are several free page load analysis tools available, including Google Webmaster Tools, Page Speed, and YSlow.

The good news is that the majority of sites require no immediate action. Page load times are easy to measure, and having a faster website offers benefits beyond helping search engine rankings. As is typical for Google, they will monitor this change on google.com before rolling it out internationally.

Stan Wang is the current SEO Director at Red Bricks Media. He is responsible for the delivery of all SEO projects. Stan can be reached at swang@redbricksmedia.com

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