SEO News – Page Speed Now in Google Analytics
By now, most of us that are involved in SEO to any reasonable level should know that the speed of a site is having an effect on a site’s rankings. Whether it’s the speed of the server, more streamlined code or the use of optimised images it all matters and Google has just confirmed this to us once again by incorporating site speed into Google Analytics.
If releasing a page load analysis tool and adding a sub-section dedicated to site speed within Webmaster Tools wasn’t enough, this is surely a step to make any good SEO pay attention and start looking at everything they can to make a site run as fast and effectively as possible.
In many ways it comes down to user experience. It makes sense that Google rewards sites that provide the best user experience possible and can be measured partly through the speed of a site.
A fast-loading site suggests that the site owner has spent money on a good hosting account or server, has optimised all images and only included them where necessary and has optimised their code to run as streamlined as possible in order to give their visitors what they want quickly and effectively.
Not only that but it also benefits you directly in the way of reducing disk space on your hosting account as well as bandwidth costs which, depending on your host, can be costly if you use more of your allocated ‘allowance’.
Site speed is only available in the new Beta version of Google Analytics and we’re seeing some results trickling in.
So if everything else wasn’t enough to make you want to speed up your site, now is the perfect time to do what you can to help your site perform better within the search engines as well as give your current visitors the best user experience possible while they’re on your site and get the most out of each and every hit.
November 23rd, 2011
You can also find page speed testing by google via the browser now
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
Does all the stuff you would expect it too without needing an extra plugin for your desktop.