Customers are very fickle when checking out a company’s web site. Unless they’re desperate, a person browsing a site tend to go quickly from one page to another. Their attention span is short. Their time is valuable. They don’t want to spend too much time waiting for a web page to load.
Companies have spent a substantial amount of money to improve page loading times. Improvements include upgrading internet connectivity, buying faster computers, reducing web applications RAM usage footprint, or investing on a content delivery network.
What other important reasons to improve web performance?
- Increase in traffic due to natural business growth, or advertising campaigns.
- Snappy response times are required when using the latest web browser tools, such as AJAX.
- Google is planning to rank web pages by their load times.
- Increase use of videos using embedded Flash, and future HTML5.
There is a cheaper way to improve web site performance: Optimize Content. It means reducing the use of heavy graphics, Flash files, or client side Javascripts. It also means reducing HTML and CSS file sizes. It may seem contradictory, but ultimately, content dictates page loading times and can improve the web browsing experience.
Makes sense to rank pages by their load times… It’d be a shame if they give it too much weight though… It might be the difference between walking from one snowball stand to another, just because theirs tastes better.
Google is becoming spammy though. It seems they give too much weight to keywords located in domains and URLs. I’ve seen it frequently when researching common web technology, where all of the people doing it know SEO.
Wikipedia at the top of every search is getting old too. Seriously, make an 0ff-link on the side or something for that. If I wanted Wikipedia that much, I’d get it myself or have the default search engine in the corner of my FireFox be “wikipedia” instead of Google.
Oh, and Google along with some of the other search giants need to start incorporating something like “mcafee siteadvisor” into their results and stop giving top #10 results to dangerous websites.
Since Google is the most popular search hub, it’s no surprise everyone wants to go to be associated with it. Google has also pushed their agendas via their search engine, such as promoting Wikipedia, Nexus One, etc.
SEO is hocus pocus. Companies can pay a ton of money to Google and be on top of the search page for their keywords. It’s that easy.