subject: How To Improve Your Page Rank And Site Traffic With Better Page Load Time [print this page] The web is a dynamic platform where new ideas spring to life and the old ones die every day. The major players on the web include the search engines, news portals and social media websites. A presence on these websites may bring life to a company in form of fresh visitors who are always on look for better products, services and information.
When we talk about the king of the internet we are for sure thinking about Google. Google has remained the number one destination for all things search. Lately, with the advent of Google+1, Google has successfully moved in the social media sphere too.
When a user searches using a keyword on Google.com, the search engine giant ranks websites in order of their relative importance and relevance. Naturally, the top 10 results get most of the eyeballs and clicks. The parameters (known as the algorithm) for ranking these websites is a close kept secret which is not divulged. Whenever Google makes changes to their ranking algorithm, it creates a lot of excitement and commotion among the internet marketing community.
Search engine optimizers, web designers and webmasters curiously look at the new results and compare them to the past ones to get a clue about the changes and the factors that are given more importance with a new algorithm shift. Recently, Google shifted their algorithm to include page load time as a ranking factor.
Websites page load time can now affect the perception Google has about ranking your website. All of us know, and usability studies prove the same that the people do not like to wait on the Internet. If they are made to wait for more than 4-5 seconds, they quickly hit the Back button in their browser to return to the search engine. Combined with website usability, this factor is enough to throw chills at web designers and developers.
What to Do to improve the Page Load Speed
There are many tools on the web that tell you about your website load speed and the factors that cause them to load slow. Pingdom tools are a very popular toolset that divulge a ton about the websites, the CSS, the Javascript and the images which may render a website slowly. The reasons may be as simple as a slow loading huge image or a JS file that is called many times on a page to complex issues like a CMS theme not working optimally.
Whatever the reason, you can easily visualize it and formulate solution. Sometimes there is more than one reason and together they work like a chain to slow down the website loading. It is important to analyze and rectify all such issues. Once you do, no not forget to test it again with the same set of tools and see a difference in the load time.
As a conclusion, search engines are trying to mimic the users more and more. Via implementing page load as a ranking factor, search engines have shown that they want what their users want. It is up to the website owners to render their sites in minimal timeframes with the best processing abilities.
