Our patience on the Internet is rapidly becoming tested. We have come to expect instant results and immediate page loads. Our Internet providers have to offer up more bandwidth to give us those results and websites have to give us instant page loads. No longer are we willing to sit and watch the spiral or some graphic try to entertain us while a flash piece loads or worse, images that seem to unfold like a turn of the century flipbook.

Understanding that sentiment, Google has made page load time a factor in SERPs (search engine results page). If you have a website that loads slowly or even slower than your competitor's you will slip in the rankings. Page load speed is not the only or even the primary factor, but it is a factor. Web design for searchability has become more and more complex and there are more and more considerations today. The biggest consideration is the user experience, and most search results are geared toward giving the user a relevant result and positive experience so these objectives are usually in synch.

I agree with page load speed as a factor for two reasons. The first is that it acknowledges the user. If a company respects my time then they won't waste it while they load their fancy flash movie that I probably don't want to watch anyway, at least not when I am trying to get answers. The second reason that I agree with this is that a website that has been designed and engineered properly will load quickly and that separates the pros from the less than professionals.

Page speed is not some random assessment. Google has the technology that measures your page load time. This is done in two ways. The first is how fast your site responds to Googlebot, the program that crawls websites for indexing and the second is actually based on your page load time in comparison with your competitor's sites.

Google is quite serious about website load speed and they offer a free tool to analyze your site. Check out the Webmaster tools under their 'lab' section. If you haven't started your Google Webmaster account, please get started right away.

Google will identify for you pages that are loading slowly and will compare your site speed with competitive sites. If you find that you are running slower than your competitors and if Google has ranked any of your pages as SLOW then you will want to take the time with your web developer to make the design and structural changes necessary to slim down your code and images to speed up your load time.

A goal is to have your pages load in less than a second. This change will improve your search rankings, improve your visitor's experience and will work better for those users who are visiting via mobile and PDAs, which by the way is an increasing trend.

Some things to improve your speed:

1. Fewer or smaller graphics

2. No flash or limited use of flash

3. CSS (cascading style sheets) layout structure in lieu of a table-based design

4. No frames

5. Shrink your script - clean coding is essential for speed load times

6. Reduce the use of widgets

7. Break up long pages into shorter pages - more pages are better

8. Static pages load faster than dynamic - consider caching dynamic pages that have to pull from databases, which takes time

9. Host your images locally rather than third party sites

This is not an all-inclusive list but it does give you enough tips to get started finding ways to improve your site load speed.

Now you might be wondering just how fast does your site load. As I mentioned above, check out your Webmaster tools https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ to get the reports and suggestions from Google. Google will tell you your exact load time in seconds and offer suggestions as to where you can improve your speed.

Mardy Sitzer Bumblebee Design & Marketing http://www.bumblebeellc.com / 212-677-4050 Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mardy_Sitzer