I consider these to be the major speed factors:

1. Hosting – If your hosting provider does not offer reliable high speed connection there is not much you can do about making your site faster. I have changed a few hosting providers in the past for this very reason. There are various tools which can help you to determine whether your website is speedy or “stuck in traffic”. You can easily check your website download speed with Google Webmaster Tools.

   If you are using a shared hosting, some of your server neighbors may hog most of the bandwidth and that will result in a substantial slowdown of your web pages performance. Let’s say they have launched a large scale email campaign and they are streaming video from their website. Most likely this will result in a substantial slow down of your web pages load time. That’s why you have to monitor your server traffic performance using your preferred software tools and if necessary talk to your hosting provider.

2. Images – Use proper compression techniques while saving images for the web. This is an old outdated topic but the truth is that most websites using wrong types of compression all the time. It all comes down to reducing the image file size picking between .png, .jpg or .gif formats when saving your images for the web.

   Try not to slice images. Image slicing technique came from the old times when web designers were confided to web page layouts based on tables, and were slicing images to fit different table cells. Now with tableless layout methods and CSS there is no need to slice images. The problem with image slicing is this: user’s browser has to download each and every slice separately and that takes additional time. When designing a web page consider how many requests will be sent to a server to download all elements.

3. HTML Code – Do not use tables for layouts, use them for data display, that’s what they originally are designed for. Also, avoid nesting tables inside tables, that takes additional download and rendering time, not to mention could result in bot’s failure to index page properly.

   Externalize all java scripts, except for the small snippets. Externalize all styling elements.

   Avoid white spaces between the code lines. This is an issue with most blog templates were generated HTML looks like spider web with a huge gaps in between. Same goes for external CSS files.

   When using CSS, avoid multiple declarations for the same element, this will help you to reduce the size of your styling documents. Also, if a page is using different layout with many unique styling elements, create a separate style sheet. For example, index page can use index.css where article page can use article.css and so forth.

   You can use html code compression through gzip or other methods.

4. Website Structure and Technologies – Keep your website structure flat avoiding additional subdirectories if possible. Deep directory structures are not search engine bot friendly and also may reduce download speed. If you are running a database, it is very important to configure it properly especially if you use re-directing to a single domain name. Same concerns shopping carts, blogs, forums and other applications. Therefore be vigilant when selecting a WordPress template or a shopping cart for your website. Too many widgets, conflicting code, broken strings, all of these are affecting website download speed.

   Same goes for Flash websites, they usually take longer to load not to mention are more difficult to be indexed if not properly optimized. It’s ok to use flash elements on your site but for the sake of performance use them sparingly.

   I don’t think that media files will affect rankings if properly embedded in the web page. Some of the development software generates large chunks of embedded code to ensure browser compatibility. I think it is better to manually define which style sheet of media type to display using browser declaration techniques.

These are major points of consideration when faced with your website speed performance. If you are a web developer, you probably have your methods but whether we like it or not, it looks like we will have to pay more attention to a speed factor thanks to the latest Google demand.

For example, if you type in a search box “marketing san diego”, you will find results not only from websites containing related text but also, from news articles related to this key phrase and possibly online published videos.

Online competition used to be narrowed down to only HTML documents (web pages) containing text but now, it is rapidly expanding to all types of media. Because of the high saturation of text based documents on the web, competition on most keywords profitable keywords has become rather tight but video publishing and marketing is not as evolved as good old html publishing. This offers an outstanding opportunity to a business to achieve high visibility online fast. A recent study by Forrester Research indicates that video result is 50 times more likely to appear on the front page of Google than a text result.

What is important about video marketing is a proper way to optimize your video to be recognized by Google as a valuable and reputable source of information. That’s how the new technical aspect of SEO for video was born. I am predicting that it will evolve quickly and will become more complex and more widespread in the near future.

This is why. Video is much more powerful advertising tool than text. I probably should create a separate post comparing video to a text but for now, let’s just agree that people watch more TV than read books. As online video marketing becomes more popular, I pretty much guarantee (!) that more and more search results from Google will show video results rather than text. I think it will happen because majority of people will prefer to watch videos than read text. Let’s not forget that Google registers every click so, it will be quite evident to Google’s team what media format is more popular.

Online video marketing will become more popular quickly and therefore it will become more competitive. This will result in evolution of yet another internet marketing discipline – video SEO. Already there are some guidelines on video optimization from Google but they are a little vague. Nevertheless, there are some companies who are successfully integrating in video map xml creation, sound optimization and content distribution.

Social media sites featuring video content are growing in popularity, size and numbers. But they should be considered only as channels for original video document distribution. Remember, every time you are uploading your video file to any of these sites, it becomes their property. If you embed a video from let’s say YouTube or Vimeo on your web page, there is no way for a search engine to determine that you are an original content creator or simply posting someone else’s materials. That’s why it is critical to stream your original footage from your website while using online video content websites as additional promotional channels.

When you are featuring your original video on your website, make sure that you have all video SEO elements in place. These include video xml map, possible transcript of the script, proper title and description. When you are posting your video on other sites, have a visual reference (your URL) address somewhere on the screen to drive traffic to your site. Most importantly, make your video informative and engaging.