Internet Marketing Clinic

In a new blog posting, Google has just announced that they are now using site speed in their ranking algorithm.

In our clinic, we have always taught that the speed with which your page loads is an important factor in achieving a high performing web site. This announcement from Google makes it official!

In their article, they also provide links to tools to evaluate the speed of your web site. These certainly belong in your “webmaster toolkit”.

One tool, in particular, I found very interesting. The webpagetest gave me a detailed readout of the time it takes to load various components on my main clinic page.  It not only breaks down the file size, but reports the time for the initial connection to the component, the time to first result, and the time to complete the download. As a result of this one examination of a single page on my site, I will institute new practices for building my pages, and will make several modifications to the page I tested.

In this specific case, I will remove the map providing directions to the classes, and will make that into a link to another page where the map and the link to Google Maps will appear. I can easily foresee how important this kind of testing can be to showing my clients how important it can be to revise how they build some of their more complicated pages on their sites!

Google also emphasizes another of the points that we harp on in the clinic, which is that the most important factor in high ranking is good, relevant content! Join us in our free Internet Marketing class to stay up to date with the latest developments in effective marketing over the web.