Website load speed affects search engine rankings ?

Site speed - how long it takes a web page to load and show up for people in a web browser window - is now one of Google's ranking factors. That means Google takes site speed into account when deciding how high a site should show up in search results. Very slow sites will have a much harder time beating out its competitors.

If visitors have to wait too long for your site to load, they're more likely to leave quickly, and less likely to do what you want them to do - like buy your product or service, contact you for a quote, sign up for your newsletter, or download your e-book.

Check how fast your website loads !

You can test how long it takes your site to load with various tools. One favorite is Pingdom's site speed test, and Google also has the new Google Page Speed Online tool. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, look under "Labs" and click "Site Performance."

What's considered slow?

In my opinion, a website that loads within 2 seconds is doing well. A site that loads in 2 to 4 seconds isn't really fast, but is acceptable if you have a bunch of relative information on the web page.

A website that takes more than 5 seconds or more to load is likely to push potential visitors on to the next web page viewing option which could very well be your competitors, and may be suffer a lower ranking. If your site takes more than 7 seconds to load, you really need to speed it up.

For more information on how to improve your site speed,

read AboutUs's 6 Easy Ways To Improve Your Site Speed, for SEO.

Till the next time,
Anthony,
Your Website Marketing Partner and Friend at ProNetUSA - WebSites and Internet Marketing

External backlinks (inbound links for Google Page Rank)

External backlinks are the most focused-on off web page aspect of SEO. Backlinks (or “inbound links”) are a fundamental pillar of search engine optimization. On-page optimization is limited in scope — there is only so much you can do with on-page optimization. The rest of your rankings will rely heavily on your off web page backlinks and how many pages and the quality of those pages that are linking into your web page(s).

Webmasters tend to keep track of Page Rank, which helps in measuring the effectiveness of backlinks to their website or blog. The biggest question is how many backlinks do you need to move your page rank up. It’s not only the amount of backlinks, but the quality of those backlinks as well

Although nobody can determine the exact Google PageRank values, the table below gives a fair representation of how many backlinks, of certain PageRank values are required to achieve a certain Google PageRank.

I know a lot of people don’t know what it takes to increase their Page Ranking using backlinks. Here’s a good graph to help explain to you how many backlinks are needed for that highly sought after page rank increase.

Till the next time,
Anthony,
Click here to page rank chart.