Google announced this week that the speed of a page is now being considered as part of how they rank pages on a web site.  This has some people happy, others scrambling.

There are a couple of things which need to be considered with this news.

• Google uses over 200 factors to “grade” a site, determining where it should be placed in the search engine rankings. Adding 1 additional factor, unless it is a large factor should have little effect on the search results.
• “All things being equal I would prefer to visit a fast loading site versus a slow one when I search for something” – the question is, what are the odds that all things are equal. They aren’t – so good, relevant content and links are still more important.
• Google launched the update a couple of weeks before the announcement. – And no one really noticed! This means that either, A) It’s not that big of a factor, or B) users had already identified the preferred site, and took the speed into effect, and helped Google rank the page by links, and content.

Does this mean you shouldn’t worry about a site speed – of course not, but it does mean you shouldn’t worry about it. It also means it’s something to consider, as Google, as well as many other companies, have seen that “that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there”. (source)

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I’ve seen numerous posts where people have claimed that good clean HTML leads to better SEO rankings. I’ve even talked about the lie that of the link between SEO and valid HTML.

I’ve yet to see any studies done which verify this claim and in fact I’ve even seen evidence to the opposite effect being true. I pointed out how in some competitive markets, the higher the ranking for the site the worse the validation recently in another post. This does not mean that poor code relates to higher rankings – just that valid HTML code doesn’t correlate to better rankings as some people would like to say, just like good clean code doesn’t mean the site will look better to visitors.

Matt Cutts recently did a short video on why Google’s own code doesn’t validate. (video opens new window – not allowed to embed)

Now does this mean that you should only have your web designers write invalid code – not, but it does mean you shouldn’t waste unnecessary time on it either.

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• Google Says Pages That Validate Do Not Get Ranking Boost (seroundtable.com)

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About a year ago, Google release their own browser, Chrome.  They been hard at work updating it, wanting to take more of the browser market share.

They built a good browser for power users, if you didn’t mind not having the extensions you’ve come to love and expect in Firefox.

Well now they are adding some of those extensions as well as other improvements. Read the official release here.

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Previously, I’ve talked about optimizing your website to improve how fast it loads.  This not only improves the perception of your site, but also how likely it is for people to stay and make a purchase, or request more information.

Optimizing your site for sales isn’t as easy as optimizing your site for speed. When we want to increase speed we know many ways to improve the performance.  We can modify files to be smaller, have files load in a different order, move the server to a faster computer, etc.

However, modifying your site to increase it’s sales requires knowing your users and testing assumptions.

Recently I was helping a client test her website to get more conversions. While using the same traffic gathering methods previously used, she noticed  a whopping 500% improvement in lead generation during the first month alone. Another client saw improvements of over 40%.

So what do you change?

There are several things which you can easily change to find improvements.

• Improve your site speed – whie not directly related, Google  notices a 20% drop in usage for every half a second slower their web page is.  If your users leave early, they cannot buy from you, or contact you for more information.
• Change headers – the client who noticed a 500% improvement, tried three different headers. Her original, and 2 new headers on the conversion page. One header did worse, and was pulled half way through the test, the other blew the first out of the water.
• Change images - pictures can tell a thousand words -  so picking the right one is important. The client with a 40% improvement got it from picking the right images to let his customers know about additional items for sale.

There are of course others, such as the call to action, guarantees, opening paragraphs, etc. When you test these, you can see improvements in how much and how often you sell.

If you need help with optimizing your site, contact me and we can start working on your site.

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