How Site Load Time Effects Rankings
Most major search engines acknowledge that how quickly your site loads is now a variable in how well you rank. The reasoning behind this is that a search engine’s goal is to provide a pleasant search experience to the end user. The quicker that they can get a searcher to what they’re looking for, the better the experience is. The better a search experience is, it is more likely that they’ll return to Google over Bing, or one search engine over another.
Many of the items that effect your site’s load time are easily fixable. These items often include asking your host to enable gzip compression, or simply resizing some of your larger images and files to more managable sizes. Below are two links that can give you insight as to what you or your host can help with to improve site load speed.
On a different but related note, make sure to keep your most important information, call-to-action, etc. “above the fold.” This means to keep your best info on the screen above a point where visitors would have to initiate scrolling before they can see the rest of this valuable information. In a nutshell, avoid scrolling to see the goods. That way, the important content or action items load faster.
Upcoming Site Audits
In our efforts to continually stay ahead of the competition, and your competitors too, we are constantly adding new tools, developing new software, etc. Part of our latest internal expansion is new auditing tools and reporting abilities. Over the next two quarters we will be auditing all of our client’s sites. This will helps us grow your SEO campaign even more by finding little tidbits of opportunities that can, collectively, add up to big added gains. For those clients that we have direct access to your site or CMS, most of the changes we’ll be doing on our end. All of which will be done at no additional cost. :) Those that maintain your site edits, we will be providing you information about page speed fix opportunities, image compression opportunities, variable fixes, etc. Look forward to more information to come.
How Blogging Helps
Do you blog? If not, you should. If you do blog, you probably should do it more often too. Search engines are now leaning towards displaying “more recent” information over old content. By adding content to your blog on a regular basis, this helps you stay “fresh” in search engine’s eyes. At least once a week posts are ideal. You can also use regular blog updates to grow your social media demographic. New blog posts provide a great opportunity to reference on your Facebook or Twitter page back to your site, or vice versa.