Page loading time is a crucial factor when it comes to estimate page’s usability as well as search engine’s rankings and Google’s Adwords quality score.
according to this statement, Google is going to update its assessment policy . Page load time it is soon due to become an important factor requiring specific assessment and optimization from webmasters and SEOs.
In order to calculate page loading time, you might try Pingdom. Pingdom is an online utility which calculates pages text, images and scripts, giving you also some interesting suggestions about improvement.
However, besides any Google statement about quality score or rankings, it’s always good to think about you user’s experience on your website: nobody likes websites taking too long to load.
Considering both usability and rankings, this should be some general guidelines to be followed one assessing and optimizing page’s loading time:
Text and page structure should load and be completely visible within the first 3 seconds
Any other element of the page must be visible within the first 8 seconds
These are only thumb rules of course. Always cehck your page weight and loading times. Working on this side of on-page optimization can lead to interesting discoveries sometimes.
It seems that search engine are digging through Twitter more and more
. In the past few days a came across a few episodes which made me think about how much search engine are considering Twitter content as valuable enough to be included into their own search results.
Let’s take a look at Bing first. Try looking for Al Gore this query on Bing: the very first result will be it’s Twitter page with is real time twits. This entry comes also before his personal website. This has been also confirmed by a public statement from Bing published on its community page.
Something interesting happens with Google as well. A few days ago I posted a link to one of my websites I found and I wanted to share with my Twitter followers. Analytics record show the following as the very first visit on the website right after the link was published on twitter:
216.200.55.83 invx.com [01/Jul/2009:02:49:01 +0200] “GET /a HTTP/1.1″ 404 136 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” “-”
Clearly the page was just being crawled by Google. The link has not apperead anywhere else and it is not a fronpage or entry page for search engines on the website.
This it’s just another proof on how important Twitter is becoming in terms on search value. It’s not going to take long before Google itself will either buy or create its own real time search tool.