In a back to the future moment, last week Google (through the personage of Matt Cutts at PubCon 2009) announced that site speed might become a ranking factor in 2010. And "Here's the pages we've built for you to learn about speeding up your website". There's a fine article exploring this over at Vertical-Leap's SEO blog.
One web browsing factor that people in the SEO business have speculated about for years is page load speed. My first encounter with this was when I first started in SEO ten years ago.
I got a job as a "web associate" and inherited a very large and expensive website. Really expensive! It was one of the first iterations of a website done completely in Flash (1.0). It looked cool and had some interesting graphics and unique navigation… OK it totally sucked.
Worse than that, most people were on 33.6 analog modems (…'member those? those strange sounds back and forth as they would hook up over the phone lines?) The site was slow. I mean dead dog slow. 20-40 minutes to load the front page slow! Really abysmally, totally stupidly slooooowwwwwwww.
I'd get into work and face a barrage of hate email from customers who wanted to use the site and were less than thrilled with it's cool factor. People had little to no filter on their language in those emails… I quickly learned to not read my email in the morning!
Once the political will inside the corporation found the fortitude to admit the site was a certified POS, we redesigned and rebuilt it. I SEO'd it and re-launched to get 10,000 times more traffic inside 3 months. The usability of the new HTML website was the major contributing factor, but I also saw from the server logs that the search engine spiders came indexing far more often after we relaunched. They liked it better too!
Highly recommended reading! Check out Emily Mace on Site Speed Becoming a Ranking Factor
