Make Your Website Quicker for Rankings

Page speed is becoming an important ranking factor.

By Ben Hook

Matt Cutts’ recent announcement that page speed is likely to become a factor seems to have built up a lot of hype around the subject and is now likely to play an increasingly important point on every SEOs checklist.

Google wants your website to be quicker, because a quicker website is better for users. In this day and age it seems like nobody wants to spend more than 3 seconds doing anything in particular. Well, in order to speed up your website Google has provided webmasters with a new addition to the firebug tool called page speed checker. The tool can be found here. The tool will look at you website and analyse it to make recommendations on how you can speed up your website. It’s all broken down easily to help you see what factors you will be able to adjust and what you will need to pass on to your webmaster. Although it is quite specific and goes into details such as javascript compression and browser caching, some of the suggestions are well worth following and will a few tweaks you can often easily reduce your page size by half, which can make a big difference.

Matt Cutts at PubCon South

Live from Austin PubCon, March 12, 2009:

Google software engineer and spam cop,  Matt Cutts, also the search giant’s spokesperson to the SEO world, gave the keynote address for the second day of PubCon South with the announcement of the Google Friend Connect API, which will integrate accounts like OpenID, Google, Yahoo or AOL Instant Messenger to make leaving comments on blogs easier.

It’s not just for blogs, but can be used for forums and other CMS systems, too. The idea is to make it easier to leave comments without having to constantly type in user names and passwords, etc.  Ultimately this will also combat spam.

Matt said that Open Source plugins for WordPress, Drupal and phpBB will be released later today. Matt says since these are Open Source, improvements from the SEO world for these plugins are welcome.

The API will allow you to join web sites so that you don’t have to log in each time to leave comments.

This was Matt’s eighth PubCon, including the very first.

Matt’s blog for SEO and related issues is http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ .  More information on the Google Friend Connect API will be available on his blog later today.

SMX West 2008 Wrap in Pictures

Here’s a wrap-up of the day by day and some of the sessions I attended at SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara, CA, February 26-28, 2008.

SMX BASH

Bruce Clay & Danny Sullivan (with attractive young woman – sorry, I didn’t get her name!) at SMX Bash to kick off the conference.

A shot of some of the folks enjoying the SMX Bash to kick off SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara.

Danny said that there was a lot of discussion over the bag to offer at SMX West, but they came up with a winner. Unlike the totes I got at every other conference I have been to, this one is a backpack with several compartments, totally cool and something I will use long after I leave Santa Clara. Congrats to the folks at SMX West!

Day 1

Danny Sullivan gives his take on Search 3.0, blended search, and 4.0, personalized search, in his keynote. Sorry it’s a bit blurry. Taken in the dark with my iPhone.

A pre-session photo of Search Engine Land’s Venessa Fox and Yahoo!’s Sean Suchter.

Danny Sullivan quizzed teams from the big four search engines and a team of search marketing all-stars on search history at SMX West 2008 Search Bowl.

The victorious Google team took the SMX West 2008 Search Bowl trophy, defeating teams from Yahoo, Ask, Microsoft and the SEM All-Stars.

SMX West 2008 Search Bowl Winners – Google!

The Search Bowl capped off the first day of SMX West 2008 with Danny Sullivan moderating a search history game show style competition between teams from the Big Four search engines – Google, Microsoft, Ask and Yahoo! – along with an SEM All-Stars team.

Well, as usual, Google kicked butt and took home the trophy.

SMX West 2008 continues at the Santa Clara Convention Center with a keynote address on Wednesday morning from Louis Monier, Vice President of Products at Cuill, a new search engine attempting to set new standards in the filed of search. Monier is formerly with Google, eBay and Alta Vista.

SMX West runs through Thursday.