Google Suggests Ways to Speed up Sites

Webmasters concerned about the impact that their page loading times could have on their position in search engine results pages (SERPs) have been told of some simple steps that they can take to make things a little faster.Google recently revealed on its Webmaster Central blog that it is to take site speed into account when ranking pages in future because "like us, our users place a lot of value in speed".

Now webmasters making use of SEO services may want to ensure that slow loading times are not hampering their efforts to reach the top of the SERPs.

In an Inside AdSense blog post, Google product manager Richard Rabbat recommends taking steps such as enabling caching of elements such as JavaScript, CSS and image files so that subsequent pages load faster.

Along with HTML and rich media elements, all of the above are to be incorporated into the determination of site speed used by Google to influence rankings.

However, the search engine does stress that it is not expecting the majority of sites to be affected, but that only the slowest one per cent should see their ranking drop significantly.