SEO tip of the day… improve your site’s speed!

Google says: Go for Web site speed, it helps your rankings.
Last Friday, April 09, 2010, Google announced on its official Webmaster central blog that they have started counting the speed of pages and considering it when ranking them.

Speeding up your Web site is important

Google says that speeding up you web pages is extremely important as it has a tremendous impact on how Web site visitors feel while browsing. Fast pages make Internet users happy. They make them feel good about what they are doing and how they are spending their valuable time.

Jake Brutlag from Google Search says that a 400 millisecond delay in Google Search resulted in a -0.59% change in searches per user. This is not that surprising as the fact that even after the delay was removed, these users still had -0.21% fewer searches, indicating that a slower user experience affects long term behavior.

Apart from happy internet users, fast Web pages help webmasters and administrators. Faster pages result to more pages views per user which in its turn results into more page views per hardware units.

Fast pages result to better Page Rank

While site speed has already started being counted in the Google ranking algorithm it is not as important as the relevance of the page.

Google is encouraging webmasters and web developers to start looking seriously into page loading speed.

Original post at the Google Webmaster Central Blog