Mediarun Search Marketing News

Google awards search engine optimisation points for efficiency

April 9th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

Google's renowned, minimal interface and swift production of search engine results pages (serps) – returning around 177 million pages relating to the keyword SEO in 0.12 seconds – is what the company's strong reputation is built on (that and millions of dollars of revenue from its many online advertising programs).

But now it seems that the search engine giant is starting to demand that same efficiency from others. Google has begun rewarding efficient, quick-loading websites with better search engine rankings on its own listings. And the move could have a major impact on the way search engine optimisation is carried out by SEO (search engine optimisation) marketing companies.

Google initially floated the idea of using website speed as a factor in its serps algorithms last December. And the move means that website owners will have to pay close attention to how much third-party technology, video content and fancy java applets they dump on their homepages.

"Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed - that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites," Google employees Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts said.

However, while they highlighted the importance of fast-loading websites - stating that "faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs" - they added that how quickly a landing page loads is by no means the be-all and end-all.

Singhal and Cutts reiterated the importance of relevant content, noting that this is – and presumably always will be – the most important factor when it comes to companies climbing up serps.

"Currently, fewer than one per cent of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point," they concluded.

But there are a number of obvious things website owners can do to dramatically boost their website speed as well as their search engine optimisation efforts.

According to industry expert Penny Sansevieri, one of the biggest barriers to Google crawlers is the implementation of flash on a website.

Writing for the Huffington Post, Sansevieri said incorporating the technology is like putting a brick wall around a webpage that no search engine can see over.

To improve SEO (search engine optimisation) she suggested creating a site map and having quality content – and similar amounts of it – on each page, as well as using a corporate blog to help saturate a site with relevant keywords.

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