Page load time is a very important SEO factor that many new webmasters overlook. It can affect your PPC quality score, your search rank, your PageRank, and ultimately how much traffic you get to your site, which affects your conversions and your ROI. That’s pretty important, right?

I highly recommend that you test your page load time every now and then. I recently found a good tool that lets you do that. It’s a pretty useful tool that I found easy and simple to use and I went to SEO Chat to compare their tool, but I found out that they don’t have a page load time analyzer. Instead, they have a code-to-text ratio tester, which is useful also, but not the same thing. In fact, your code-to-text ratio does affect your load time, but that’s not all that affects it.

Other things that can affect your page load time include:

• Big files like Flash and multimedia files
• Lots of graphic images
• Image backgrounds
• Javascript code
• An abundance of CSS files
• Slow server

Many of the items that increase your page load time can be placed in external files on your server and referenced in your HTML. It would do your site good to have it tested for page load time and get your weaknesses fixed.

Caroline Melberg
Melberg Marketing
Blue Chip Marketing Tips
Small Business Mavericks

Tags: code-to-text ratio, page load time, seo, website development

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under SEO for Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.