Time Will Be of The Essence

At PubCon Las Vegas, recently, Google’s Matt Cutts told the audience that site speed may become a new ranking factor in 2010. In other words, the websites that come up fastest will be given priority in search results.

So, how fast is your website? If it’s over three or so years old, it may not be as fast as it could be. Web programmers worldwide are constantly finding ways to simplify and speed up sites – yours could be due for a tune-up.

Here are some suggestions from Small Business Trends:

The order of things on your page will affect its load time, so make sure you’re using proper HTML, and cleaning up your CSS and JavaScript so that users aren’t left waiting when they try to access your site. If you don’t know how fast your site is loading, tools like WebPageTest or Pingdom Page Load offer easy ways to test it out.

Obviously, speed will probably never be the sole factor in determining page rank on Google, but if you could gain even one spot higher in a search, the investment of effort in turbo-charging your site speed could be a profitable one.

Come back next week for another prediction about how Internet marketing changes WILL affect you this year. Or subscribe now for $0 and get timely updates sent right to you.

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