Month: December 2012

It’s a cliché to say we live in an age of impatience, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Internet users expect immediate information delivery. Research indicates they won’t wait long.

Bounce rates increase with page load times. Slower loading pages lead to more users clicking the back button. These users will then return to the search engine. They will likely choose the next link, which could be a competitor.

Google, in its effort to direct its users to the sites most likely to satisfy them, uses page load times as one of its signals for determining ranking. All else being equal, you could be losing ranking to a competitor because your site loads less swiftly.

There are various strategies site owners can implement to make sure that their users get the pages they want as quickly as possible, and we’re going to have a look at some of the most important ones here.

Google is secretive about its ranking algorithms. They are a complex mixture of over two hundred carefully weighted signals that contribute to deciding where on the search engine results pages a particular page appears.

People don’t like complexity and secrecy, especially when their income depends on the information that’s hidden. They yearn for quick and simple solutions, and so naturally there arises a group who will sell them spurious peace of mind. In our industry, that place is occupied by the bad SEO, who promises a quick-fix ride to the top of the SERPs, often employing many of the methods we’re about to discuss. No SEO worth his salt is going to rely on these techniques, or promise an easy and simple solution to the problem of ranking well.
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