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Tweak your website for Google’s new search engine

Sometime after the New Year, Google will roll-out a new algorithm called Caffeine to improve search results.

For the most part Google is always tweaking and adjusting its search engine across all their datacenters in order to improve speed and accuracy.

This includes analysis of how people are searching, what they are searching for, and what they do once they find the search results.

Google says there are literally thousands of factors that play a part of how Google ranks and displays search results.

I have followed news and posts across many reputable websites for the last few months and noticed that there is one recurring theme -- SPEED. If your website loads at a tortoise rate of more than 20 seconds, your search engine results are suffering. A fast loading website will help it rank a little better in Google.

Here are factors that affect your website’s loading speed.

FACTORS FOR LOADING SPEED

The quality of your web hosting server
Not all hosting companies are the same. Your website might be sitting on a shared server along with hundreds of other websites taxing the server bandwidth.

The amount of graphics or animation running on your homepage
Check with your web designer if you suspect that your splash page or home page is loading slowly. Ask him or her what can be done to speed things up. Maybe you have a Flash animation that can be replaced with a faster loading Java Script animation; or remove your animation in lieu of a single image.

Any third party application running on your homepage such as RSS feeds, Ads or Widgets
Many RSS come from third party sources so you have no control over the speed at which these are delivered. You might have a page pulling from multiple sources. Be sure these are loading quickly.

Third party widgets include Weather or other informational sources. Make sure these are loading quickly and not adding seconds to your homepage loading.

You may also have ads coming from third party sources. Most ads such as Google or Yahoo load quickly. But if you are serving up image based ads or video ads, test your page load time with and without these ad feeds for a comparison.

The type of coding for HTML, CSS, Java Script and CMS on your homepage

HTML and CSS is the table-based and DIV-based development behind your web pages. There are ways to streamline the coding in your pages to shave off page loading time.

CMS or Content Management Systems – Your website might be running in a CMS system such as Dot Net Nuke, Drupal, Joomla, Word Press, Magento or other CMS system. Check with your web developer to be sure you are running the most recent build-version or have installed recent updates or patches. This will enhance your loading speed and guard against hackers.

There you have it. When the next big Google Quake hits after the New Year, you should be able to gain a competitive edge on the Internet by understanding their new algorithm and how to leverage it.