Given google’s recently announced plan to factor site speed into it’s search algorithm in Q1 I decided to take a look at their new site speed tool in the Google labs section of the webmaster tools interface. The results are below.
Bottom line some really quick wins, kill the delicious button on every page of my paper airplane site that is harming my load time. Replace the old google analytics code with the new google analytics asynchronous snippet and get the whole site gzip compressed (am really bummed my shared hosting doesn’t do this already, seems an easy win).
Nice tool released by Google so you should all take a look at it and at least nail the quick wins. This will be a big deal in Q1 I am sure (although that being said caffeine as a whole is gonna be interesting).
The other interesting note today is here from search engine land google is now personalizing results for everyone with a google cookie. My search has gotten better and better thanks to this but as someone who worries about SEO I often look at the non-personalized results too. Personalized and non-personalized are diverging rapidly so really understanding user behavior and making your site compelling is growing more and more important.
Long term optimizing for user experience is key to maximize success in Google (site speed, low bounce rate etc…) and social media. I think it’s great that generating traffic and user satisfaction are coming closer and closer together.