Comments on: What SEO’s Need to Know About Page Speed

By: Stephanie Woods

Stephanie Woods — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:31:03 +0000

In reply to Jon Wade.

I can understand where you’re coming from, but there are other factors that come into play when it comes to the Google algorithm. For example, having videos embedded on your site can cause it to slow down (by not much if done properly), however, giving people the opportunity to interact with your site can increase pageview time and the number of pages viewed. Plus having images and videos rank in the search engines can help you own the SERPs for terms outside of only having your site listed. Because of Universal Search Results besides just your website listing, you could have an image, video, shopping listing, and a news article all listed on a page for a term.

By: Ruud Hein

Ruud Hein — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:08:52 +0000

In reply to Jon Wade.

Valid concern. Without having read/seen/heard the data and its analysis I’m still pretty sure it doesn’t stand alone, doesn’t act in a vacuum. Other elements are at play. Like, users who do get to do what they want on a site perceive its load time as being faster then when they don’t succeed. So experience of success causes a perception of swift speed. Second, images help people establish rapport with content; if the rapport helps them connect and feel satisfied about their page visit, maybe they would describe the page as having loaded very fast?

By: Jon Wade

Jon Wade — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:18:31 +0000

Just viewed Marissa Meyers presentation “Seattle Conference on Scalability: Scaling Google for…” on YouTube today, and she provides an example of Google testing that possibly led to the whole page speed issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT1UFZSbcxE

About halfway in I think. Basically they provided users with more results, as that is what users said they wanted. But the response was that 20% of users left. Analysis showed page load time increased from 0.4s to 0.9s. They concluded that providing faster pages was more important to users than giving the users what they actually thought they wanted.

I am now thinking about all those images I have added to make my site nicer for users – maybe these are in fact making it worse!
.-= Jon Wade recently posted: Excell Communications Go Into Administration =-.

By: Stephanie Woods

Stephanie Woods — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:25:56 +0000

In reply to Gary.

That’s really interesting Gary. Thanks for sharing.I will be exploring this further for sure!

By: Gary

Gary — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 04:35:18 +0000

It’s great that Google is releasing the mod_pagespeed Apache module. At least a number of factors that can improve Website load performance will be taken care of by the new module!
.-= Gary recently posted: Google Speed Module to help WordPress =-.

By: Stephanie Woods

Stephanie Woods — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:48:30 +0000

In reply to Nick Bentley.

Thanks for the great tips Nick!

Oh man I wish that some companies would get over their obsession with Flash as well. Some companies spend so much money on their fancy Flash animation in the first place, they are reluctant to change it.

Good to hear your feedback on Google DNS as there isn’t heaps of info on it out there yet. You should write a blog post. 🙂

By: Stephanie Woods

Stephanie Woods — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:37:02 +0000

In reply to Alan Bleiweiss.

Thanks Alan. I find that getting developers to do what an internet marketer recommends is half the battle sometimes! People want their rankings to improve, but don’t want to do anything to their site to fix it. They just want you, the SEO, to wave your magical SEO wand and have them rank. But like you said, at least you’re getting them to think about these things for future sites they are working on. I find that a lot of developers try to keep up with SEO, but as you know, it’s a lot to keep up with sometimes.
.-= Stephanie Woods recently posted: Stress = Productivity? =-.

By: Nick Bentley

Nick Bentley — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:12:39 +0000

Hey Stephanie,
It’s definitely a good idea, and I wish flash would die already. Still, the biggest corporations still use it a lot to their own peril. I use an old shareware version of Lview, and what it can do is batch compress jpeg files down quite well.
Before making a site or doing anything I’ll drag and drop all the images (with a backed up copy) and then go through the template to see if anything is looking obviously degraded. You can typically chop 30-40 percent off the size, and that’s pretty noticeable. I also use as little JavaScript as possible. Usually the slowest sites are newbies who load up on free hit counters, java applets, and the like.
I still won’t skimp on photos though, they really help keep interest, especially in a long blog post to break up the text. The Google DNS service is a good idea, I ran a local DNS program which cached and it was a big speed boost for loading pages. The faster your DNS the better.
Probably the worst offender is basic $5 a month hosting. They pack so many sites on those machines to be able to make a profit it’s unreal sometimes. I really like virtual hosting, it’s about 25 percent of the cost of a dedicated host, and as long as your sites aren’t heavy duty MySQL monsters, it’s more than enough to load 10-20 domains with good performance.

Nick
.-= Nick Bentley recently posted: A review of the top affiliate marketing companies. =-.

By: Alan Bleiweiss

Alan Bleiweiss — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:09:16 +0000

Good to see such a well rounded article on this Steph. When the issue first came to light a couple months ago, I did some checking on some of my client’s sites – sites that I’d previously complained to the developers about due to over-use, abuse and mis-use of all sorts of scripts and page-load drag. That’s when I found pingdom and began generating reports that I now give to those developers.

Of course they’re reluctant to go back to existing sites and resolve issues, which infuriates me, but for the most part they’re at least thinking about it and experimenting with new methods on new sites they’re working on.
.-= Alan Bleiweiss recently posted: Google AdWords Contact Forms – A Bad Idea =-.