The news that page speed will be included in Google’s ranking algorithms as of 2010 was received with interest in the search engine optimization (SEO) community, and not without a measure of trepidation. However, this week’s announcement that the search giant would incorporate an easy-to-use analytics tool was welcomed.
Search Engine Land reports that the "site performance" report will be found in the "labs" section of Google Webmaster Tools, and the default view will show a graph comparing a website’s average load speeds to other pages across the internet and detailing the performance of the website over the past several months.
A more detailed look at Google’s new webmaster tool was provided by Search Engine Roundtable, which dissected its own low speed ratings and demonstrated some of the suggestions that the tool offered to improve load times for site visitors. The tool advises cleaning up DNS entries and combining external CSS.
Google’s changing crawler algorithms ensure that search engine optimization (SEO) professionals face an ever-shifting challenge in maintaining a high page rank for client websites.
