How can upload speed affect SEO

When you think about Search Engine Optimisation factors I would guess that many people leap straight to considering their SEO strategies in terms of keywords, content relevancy and link building. In fact I would be very surprised if many webmasters considered the page Load Time of their site as being an SEO factor. Load Times are usually only a consideration when webmasters start to get interested in Rich Media Files and other media formats. This is less and less of a consideration as bandwidth availability increases and high speed broadband becomes more common worldwide.

However page Load Times can have a direct bearing on the authority of your site, and thus its importance in the eyes, or rather the algorithms of the Search Engines.

Search engines quality score your site, a score that works towards your site's overall placement in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Load Time is a factor of this scoring because it is concerned with the quality of user experience and the effectiveness of the site as a platform to achieve a high click through rate. Both of these factors are largely determined by the load speed. If your site is heavy and slow to load then users will effectively give up on it and go elsewhere. Worse still any advertising you have on your site (particularly PPC campaign adverts) will also suffer as users on low bandwidth or low speed connections (such as wifi or on mobile connections) leave before the page has loaded. For these reasons a slower loading site will not appear as high in the SERPs as a lighter page with the same level of relevancy and of PageRank.

There are various ways to ensure your webpages load quickly, ranging from simply keeping the design light and free of large media files to making sure your server has some form of caching system to make sure that your pages are stored in memory rather than reading solely from the hard drive. Making sure your Load Times are low, even to low speed internet users will ensure your other SEO strategies are as effective as they can be.

For more information about page loading times and our SEO services, please contact SEO Junkies.