As Brafton reported, Matt Cutts recently said that Google gives SEO advice to “make the web a better experience,” and now it seems the company is offering a new server tool to make the web a faster place. The company has announced a mod_pagespeed for Apache tool that marketers may find makes their pages load more quickly – which could keep consumers engaged on a site longer.
The mod_pagespeed for Apache module can reduce page lead time by up to 50 percent. (An effective YouTube video posted by the company demonstrates its efficiency.) This new tool follows Google’s launch of Page Speed, which offers web developers suggestions on how to boost web page speed, last year.
“It’s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier,” says Richard Rabbat, product manager for Google’s “Make the Web Faster” initiative.
Go Daddy and content delivery network Cotendo are partnering with Google on this project. Go Daddy president and COO Warren Adelman believes that reducing load time will significantly benefit businesses as it improves website visitors’ experience.
Google is all about speed – not only does the search engine now offer web developers a tool to make their pages load quicker, but it also consistently rewards marketers for updating their content at a rapid pace. From this year’s launch of Google Caffeine, which frequently indexes the web to offer fresh results, to the inclusion of the date in results snippets that emphasizes the relevancy of recent content, Google expects marketers to move quickly when it comes to optimizing their sites.
