Getting Some Google Love

18 September 2009

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Boost your rankings by changing your approach to search marketing, urges Lawrence Jones of hosting provider UKFast.

Some see making your fortune on the internet as a myth or fairytale, others are more inclined to think that they've missed the boat. They may feel there's a level of saturation in the marketplace and there's no denying it, competition on the web is fierce. But right now, there are businesses accelerating their online success, by changing the way they approach search engine marketing.

For a decade the UKFast R&D department has monitored thousands of web domains, built websites and researched into what makes a successful online business. The old ideas of keyword stuffing and reciprocal linking died a death with the evolution of the search engines so now SEM is much more subtle, and affected by hundreds of different variables.

Today, the best way to get Google Love and boost your ranking is to impress them by focussing on pleasing your web users instead. Don't dwell on "what will help me rank higher?" Think instead, "what do my visitors want?"

Whilst users in every sector have different expectations, the one common demand is speed.

Google has identified speeding up the web as its highest priority. Vic Gundotra, VP engineer at Google says: "Our internal data shows that users clearly, even subconsciously, prefer sites and applications that are snappier."

The search giant ran tests that stated conclusively that slowing down the page load time by half a second equated to a drop in traffic of 20%.

Its findings are backed by Amazon, who tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.

Speed is a staple requirement of progress and success on the internet. The demands of web users have shaped emerging technologies and vice-versa. YouTube, now utilises the same amount of resource as the entire internet did in the year 2000. It couldn't survive without a faster web.

Through speed, customer service is vastly improved, online marketing becomes much more potent and dynamic content can be utilised at its optimum. Why? Because they are intrinsically linked.

Search engines must deliver the best service possible by ranking sites according to their relevance to the user and ability to offer the best experience. If customers don't find what they want quickly enough, search engines are reluctant to send them there again. It's all about customer experience so sites are ranked more highly for their relevance and speed.

A great industry example is online travel site, Let's Stay UK, which recently launched a new website placing it on a faster infrastructure. Within six weeks, www.letsstaytogether.co.uk had gained a top spot on page one of the organic Google search for its major key terms. The only differential was speed and this is not an isolated case.

As Google's Communications & Public Affairs department says: "It's fair to say that a speedy site will rank better (it's true for adverts, as well)."

Within Pay-Per-Click campaigns Page Load speed is stated as one of the major factors used to calculate your website's Quality Score. Websites with higher quality scores pay less money for advertising, yet appear higher up the sponsored links.

So the question is - how do you increase your speed?

There are two steps that will make your site faster and amplify your marketing opportunities.

Coding to Avoid Latency

Nobody wants to wait for the information they request. Building a site which is easily navigable, optimising coding and compressing images decreases latency. This can be achieved by minimising request size, payload size and round trip times of your site. By doing this you utilise much less server capacity which can also reduce your hosting resource and cost.

Enhance Speed From the Ground Up

A good hosting company will combine the speed of its network with other innovations to give you the fastest response. Do you realise that to deliver video content faster on a Linux server you can tune the TCP/IP stacks?

Make sure you have enough RAM to fulfil requests quickly and investigate your bandwidth allowance. It must be uncontended and realistic. Unlimited is never unlimited. Many hosting providers struggle with overcontended networks now that their customers are realising their bandwidth allowances. These networks slow down as a result.

The internet is a level platform but you take the advantage if you give users what they want. So, forget about SEO, please Google by focusing on your customers and give them the speed they need.

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