Speed is of the Essence for 2010 SEO Rankings

With Google Caffeine expected to give the world’s leading search engine a shot of speed and accuracy in the New Year it appears that speed could become a feature of SEO rankings!

This has been muted through much of 2009 and it appears that it could take effect in 2010. Google have long championed the need to make the Internet quicker to enhance people’s browsing satisfaction and it appears they seem keen to reward sites that load quickly.

“A lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast”

Speaking to Web Pro News, Matt Cutts, software engineer at Google, intimated that they are seriously looking at introducing speed based ranking, although he stopped short of saying anything certain had been agreed.

"Historically, we haven't had to use it (speed) in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

This could be a pre-cursor to the roll-out of Caffeine in the New Year as initial tests, reported in this interesting article on Mashable, suggest it finds and displays search results twice as fast as its current guise. With Google offering speedy results for 2010, many people are likely to become accustomed to quick browsing and as such, it could be beneficial for sites to improve their speed.

“I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about 'how do I have my site be fast”

Matt Cutts continued by saying: "I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about 'how do I have my site be fast,' how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?'".

It is thought that sites performing quickly are likely to retain their visitors whereas sites taking a long time to load are inclined to lose visitors. Google could reward these sites that have a quick load time compared against similar sites that are slow, after all, as a visitor you are more inclined to stay with a site that loads quickly.

If this addition to SEO ranking takes shape in 2010 it could spark an interesting scrabble for sites to improve their efficiency as well as concentrating on things such as strong content.
Google have introduced a Site Speed Site to help Webmasters improve the efficiency of sites with numerous tools available to execute this.

To speak with a home james campaign manager to understand how we could help implement an effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign for your company, please get in touch with us.