Improving Site Speed for Stronger Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Land recently came out with an article discussing SEO in light of how Google algorithms and ranking factors have become more complex and opaque. Rather than try to account for all the criteria (and there are numerous factors that feed into search engine ranking), the article urges companies to prioritize and focus on certain qualities in their website.

Among those qualities is site speed.

Why is site speed important?

If your site loads more quickly:

• It will perform significantly better in search results.
• Visitors will be less likely to hit the back button in frustration (the article points out how people visiting your site on a mobile device generally won’t wait more than a few seconds before abandoning it).
• If visitors stay on your site, they’ll be more likely to want to explore it and interact with it.

What are some of the things you can do to boost site speed?

• Use Google PageSpeed. This tool will run analyses on your site and give you insights into how to improve its speed and its performance on mobile devices.
• Make your code lean and clean. Go through your code and eliminate anything unnecessary. Cut down on spacing, indentations, and line breaks. Use a single external stylesheet for CSS.
• Remove unnecessary elements from your site. Do you really need that bit of animation? Can you take away a few of the images or delete some of the plug-ins you’ve installed?
• Rely on compression for large pages. A page that’s rich in content is good for the quality of your site, but could slow it down; compression can help with that.
• Optimize each element for speed. For instance, ensure that images are the right size and resolution.

For further assistance, please contact us. We’ll work with you to improve your site’s SEO in a number of ways, including its speed and performance.