Top SEO rankings – It’s time to take a look at your website speed

With Google and other search engines turning stricter, proper optimization of a website for higher SEO rankings is getting more complicated or intricate. In an attempt to defeat black hat SEO practices that pollute the search results as well as Google’s updates like Panda and Penguin. The basic objective is to make sure that only quality and user-friendly sites earn high keyword placements.

If you want to have a good search engine rank, you must do a lot of things in an efficient and tactful manner. Whereas some websites excel in certain fields, others lag behind in others. For instance, a website may have high quality content but poor technical support. Except a few of them, most websites lag behind in one field or the other.

SEO ranking – The deciding factors :

The most common things that we hear about SEO are content quality and back links. Of course, these factors are very essential, but the technical part cannot be disregarded. One of these crucial technical factors is website speed. Recently, Google announced that a faster loading website improves your Google rankings and website visibility. The search engine has clearly stated that among the 200+ factors that decide your site’s rank, website speed is possibly the most important contributor. While nobody knows what those 200 factors actually are, declarations like these must be heard loud and clear.

Website speed – Why is it so important? :

 This is actually a very simple concept. The reason why it’s so important is that it’s a deciding factor in the user-friendliness of a website. Well, this only makes sense – isn’t it? If you website takes more than six seconds to load, it’ll be a frustrating experience for the visitors. Quite naturally, most of them will leave without even taking a look at your site. Google, basically, doesn’t support this thing. All search engines attempt to provide their users with high quality websites that take a minimum amount of time to load. Quite obviously, sites that load quickly get a preference on the search engine list. Slow and listless websites are absolutely useless in the eyes of search engines

Studies have shown that somebody who waits more than six seconds for a page to load, ultimately abandons the site and moves on to another one. The same survey shows that 45 percent visitors expect a page to load in 2 seconds, and 55 percent of visitors are unlikely to make purchases from a website that’s slow or sluggish.

Slow website – Does it hurt your SEO rankings?

Well, the answer is yes. No matter how well-planned your SEO techniques are, slow website speed can drop the rankings within a short period of time. Sadly, if your website gets marked as slow and meets speed errors, chances are that it’ll affect your SEO rankings in a negative way. In short, it’s no use messing around with this SEO factor in any way. Quite obviously, poor SEO performance will have a direct effect on your business as well. Once you stop getting leads for your website, you’ll incur loss. Ultimately, your business will be at the risk of closing down.