Google Cares How Fast Your Website Loads, So Optimize It!

A few weeks back, I had a short overview of recent advances in search engine marketing. As I have noted, paid search marketing goes hand in hand with getting increasingly better organic search positions, known as search engine optimization.

The stimulating and frustrating thing about SEO is that it is more or less wholly dependent on Google’s proprietary search ranking algorithm, the genesis of which came from Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s graduate work in Computer Science at Stanford. To maintain its dominant share of the market, Google is constantly tweaking and re-engineering its search engine to make it faster, better and more versatile. But that also means that SEO specialists need to constantly rewrite their books and be on the watch all the time. A first page result today might very well slip into the 2nd or 3rd over time if it was not properly tended to – that is, being updated with new, relevant content, being linked to with new authoritative links.

For example, Google just released an update to its indexing engine called Caffeine that purportedly provides 50% fresher results than before. That means newer pages are getting indexed and prioritized more than before, probably at the eventual expense of older and less frequently updated sites.

As part of our strategic consulting services to our portfolio, we often give them advice on SEO implementation or basic SEO strategies when they come to us seeking more agile development methods. We also often point them to SEO firms that have been successful with other companies before. However, our experience also taught us that it is often easy to give advice, while it might be a lot harder to execute upon the advice, because SEO requires both a lot of work over a long period of time. As I have noted — because of the fluid nature of the algorithm — SEO has to be done continuous and persistent, with little room for error or slacking off.

We also recognize, though, that being small and lean as they are, our expansion stage companies do not always have the stomach to take on a full blown SEO process. Therefore, we focus on bite-sized content management marketing efforts that might add up in time to help get the company a good part of the way there.

Which leads to the title of this post. Google is taking account of the speed at which a site loads into its search ranking algorithm, according to an April update. To take advantage of this, webmasters should use a variety of tools that help optimize web page loading time. The site loading time can be optimized by making some tweaks to its content and code structure. Thus, having a fast loading site may not only help create a competitive advantage for the company in terms of superior user experience, it also helps with the search engine ranking.

While many websites are already made for fast loading time, I believe that most websites’ loading time can be improved by the ideas described above, at minimal effort. This is an example of how some time-efficient, simple-to-do tweaks might go a long way in improving SEO, courtesy of a Google update to its indexing engine.

If you have any other simple Google SEO tweaks that can help our portfolio companies, please let us know!