If you want your site to rank better on the search engines, you need to understand how SEO works. One of the critical factors that affect SEO is website speed.
A common joke in the internet circles says that if you want to hide something in a place where no one will find them, you should hide them on the second page of Google. While this joke sounds corny, it suggests that many internet users do not go beyond the first five results on the search engines. There are some statistics to back this. According to one study, 75% of internet users don’t scroll beyond the first page of the Google search results. That means if your website is to bring traffic, you can’t afford to rank on the second, third, or even the fourth page. If you are ranking on these pages, you will not get the visibility that turns into clicks, the clicks that turn into traffic, and the traffic that converts into revenue.
The role of SEO in search engine ranking
If you are a beginner in SEO, you may be wondering where SEO comes in the search engine ranking. For a start, SEO means search engine optimization. What this means is that you are optimizing your site to rank better on the search engines.
There are two types of SEO: On-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to activities you do on your site to help it rank better. They include writing great content (content is king) and improving the speed of your website.
Off-page SEO involves things you do outside your site to help you rank better. They include link building, commenting on forums, guest posting, influencer outreach, social network, and much more.
You can see that SEO is a broad subject that is impossible to cover adequately in this article. But for this article, we will focus on one metric that affects SEO: website speed.
The role of website speed in SEO
Google has already revealed that website speed is one of the metrics they use in ranking websites. So, there is no doubt about it as it's from the horse's mouth. Therefore, if your website speed is slow, you shouldn't expect to rank highly on Google. The good news is that there are tips you can use to increase internet speed. These include:
• Enable compression. Ensure that you reduce the sizes of your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.
• Minimize redirects. Every time a page redirects your users to another page, they will spend more time waiting for the cycle of request and response to complete.
• Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. When you optimize your code, you will be increasing the speed of your site
• Optimize images. Ensure that the images aren’t bigger than necessary
• Enhance server response time.
• Leverage your browser catching
• Get rid of render-blocking JavaScript
Once you understand how to improve your website speed, you will have hacked one part of SEO, and you will start to see an improvement in your site ranking.