Search Engine Optimization Information

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Page Load Time and Google Rankings

Slow loading web pages provide a poor user experience. Searchers generally will not stick around for more than 5 – 10 seconds waiting for your page to load. Extensive marketing research indicates that this is a major factor affecting web site sales and conversion. We have also known for a long time that the quality score of your Google adwords campaign can be adversely affected by this.

If you have a really slow site, it may also impact how high you rank in Google. The influential search giant has indicated that it wants the web to be a faster place and it can certainly engineer its algorithms to return faster web pages over slower ones. For a long time it has generally been agreed that page load has been a factor that Google and other search engines has taken into consideration. Recently, SEO consultants have been paying more attention to this ranking algorithm, since Google has been publicly placing more emnphasis on it.

Google has many ranking factors and it is doubtful that page load time will be assigned significant weight. In a competitive marketplace however it could mean the difference between page one or page two. Just make sure your site loads fast — both the end user and Google will love you for it.